Nor can the error of creation be
corrected violently by a second arbitrary act, such as suicide, or the
annihilation of the universe by some ultimate general collapse. If such
events happen, they still leave the door open to new creations and fresh
errors. But the marvel is (I will return to this point presently) that the
world, in the person of a human individual endowed with reason, may
perceive the error of its ways and correct it ideally, in the sphere of
estimation and worship. Such is the only possible salvation. Reason, in
order to save us, and we, in order to be saved, must both subsist: we must
both be incidents in the existing world. We may then, by the operation of
reason in us, recover our allegiance to the infinite, for we are bone of
its bone and flesh of its flesh: and by our secret sympathy with it we may
rescind every particular claim and dismiss silently every particular form
of being, as something unreal and unholy.
An even more cogent reason why M. Benda's God cannot have been the creator
of the world is that avowedly this God has never existed. We are expressly
warned that "if God is infinite Being he excludes existence, in so far as
to exist means to be distinct. In the sense which everybody attaches to
the word existence, God, as I conceive him, _does not exist_". Of course,
in the mind of a lover of the infinite, this fact is not derogatory to
God, but derogatory to existence. The infinite remains the first and the
ultimate term in thought, the fundamental dimension common to all things,
however otherwise they may be qualified; it remains the eternal background
against which they all are defined and into which they soon disappear.
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