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Updated: May 6, 2025
A sounder Psychology has taught us that our conception of existence arises, in the first instance, from our own conscious experience; and that, when this conception subsequently expands into the idea of Absolute Being, and results in the belief of a necessary, self-existent, and eternal Cause, the new element which is thus added to it may be accounted for by the principle of causality, which constitutes one of the fundamental laws of human thought, and which, if it may be said to resemble intuition in the rapidity and clearness with which it enables us to discern the truth, differs essentially from that immediate intuition of which Spinoza speaks, since it is dependent on experience, and, instead of gazing direct on Absolute Being, makes use of intermediate signs and manifestations, by which it rises to the knowledge of "the unseen and eternal."
Did he know that it was a balked, defeated life, that waited for him, vacant of the triumphs he had planned? "The self-existent soul! stopped in its growth by chance, this omnipotent deity, the chance burning of a mill!" Knowles muttered to himself, looking at Holmes.
We begin to hear of self-existent laws which reign supreme and bind nature fast in fact. By this learned substitution for God, it was once confidently assumed that the race was to emerge from mythical dawn and metaphysical shadows into the noon-day of positive knowledge.
For that name 'Jehovah, both by its signification and by the circumstances under which it was originally employed, tells us a great deal about God. It tells us, for instance, by virtue of its signification, that He is self-existent, depending upon no other creature. 'I AM THAT I AM! No other being can say that.
"Of course; that is a mere truism," returned Wingfold, "equivalent to, It lives in virtue of life. There is nothing spontaneous in that. Its life must in some way spring from the true, the original, the self-existent life." "There you are begging the whole question," objected the doctor.
She was very still for a few minutes, evidently thinking earnestly. She then asked, "Who made God?" I was compelled to evade her question, for I could not explain to her the mystery of a self-existent being. Indeed, many of her eager questions would have puzzled a far wiser person than I am. Here are some of them: "What did God make the new worlds out of?"
Holyoake himself admits a self-existent, underived, and eternal Being, a being exempt, therefore, from all the conditions of time and causality to which others are subject, while he ascribes the origin of intelligent, self-conscious beings to Nature, which is "neither intelligent nor self-conscious," rather than to God, the father of spirits, Himself a Spirit, infinite, omniscient, and almighty.
He who has had a beginning, needs the indwelling power of that beginning to make his being complete not merely complete to his consciousness, but complete in itself justified, rounded, ended where it began with an 'endless ending. Then is it complete even as God's is complete, for it is one with the self-existent, blossoming in the air of that world wherein it is rooted, wherein it lives and grows.
In both forms of the theory, the agency of God and the instrumentality of natural means are, in a certain sense, acknowledged; but in the former, second causes are apt to be regarded as if they were self-existent and independent of God; in the latter, second causes are apt to be virtually annulled, and all events to be regarded as the immediate effects of Divine volition.
"How could matter of itself produce order, even if it were self-existent and eternal?
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