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It is most inconsistent: yet what can I do?” Polemo had said what he considered enough. He was one of those who sold his words. He had already been over-generous, and was disposed to give away no more. After a time, Callista said, “Polemo, do you believe in one God?” “Certainly,” he answered; “I believe in one eternal, self-existing something.” “Well,” she said, “I feel that God within my heart.
Well, if this is done, we have the postulation of a Being which is self-existing, infinite, and eternal relatively, at all events, to our powers of conception.
Indeed, the whole tendency of recent scientific speculation is towards the view that the universe consists of some one substance, which, whether self-existing or created, is diverse only in its relation to ignorance.
But if, again, you say that 'self' is maker, then surely self should make things pleasingly; but now things are not pleasing for oneself, how then is it said that self is maker? But if he did not wish to make things so, then he who wishes for things pleasing, is opposed to self, the maker. Sorrow and joy are not self-existing, how can these be made by self?
Many fine passages might be quoted from Philo on the impossibility that the first self-existing Being should become cognisable to the sense of man; and even in Palestine, no doubt, John the Baptist and our Lord Himself spoke no new doctrine, but rather the common sentiment of the more enlightened, when they declared 'that no man had seen God at any time. In conformity with this principle the Jews, in the interpretation of the older Scriptures, instead of direct and sensible communication from the one great Deity, had interposed either one or more intermediate beings as the channels of communication.
It rejects vegetables, sweets, fruits, all drinks but water or milk, and although content to satisfy its hunger with dressed meat, darts with an eager growl upon raw flesh. Man alone is the creature of imitation in good or in bad. His faculties and instincts, although containing the germ of everything noble, are not independent and self-existing like those of the brutes.
He inferred the existence of God from what he considered the intelligence and design manifested in natural objects. Mainly, however, Plato's theism was founded upon his doctrine of a universe of ideas, and as no one today holds that ideas are self-existing realities, the foundation of his theism is destroyed.
This universe existed only in the first divine idea yet unexpanded, as if involved in darkness, imperceptible, undefinable, undiscoverable by reason, and undiscovered by revelation, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep; then the sole, self-existing power, himself undiscovered, but making this world discernible, with five elements and other principles of nature, appeared with undiminished glory, expanding his idea or dispelling the gloom.
But neither his certainty nor Spinoza's will be of any use to a man who has no such idea, and who cannot recognise the lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at. From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of God.
If the phenomena compels us to affix limits to his goodness, we find it impossible to conceive limits to the power of a creative, eternal, self-existing principle. But even supposing we could form the conception of such a Being having his power limited as well as his goodness, still we can conceive no second Being independent of him.
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