146. The first result of such a consideration in a reader of Locke will naturally be an attempt to treat the inner synthesis as a fiction of thought or figure of speech, and to confine real existence to single feelings in the moments of their occurrence. This, it will seem, is to be faithful to Locke’s own clearer mind, as it frequently emerges from the still-returning cloud of scholasticism. The final result will rather be the discovery that the single feeling is nothing real, but that the synthesis of appearances, which alone for us constitutes reality, is never final or complete: that thus absolute reality, like ultimate substance, is never to be found by us--in a thinking as little as in a material thing--belonging as it does only to that divine self-consciousness, of which the presence in us is the source and bond of the ever-growing synthesis called knowledge, but which, because it is the source of that synthesis and not one of its partial results, is neither real nor knowable in the same sense as is any other object. It is this presence which alone gives meaning to ‘proofs of the being of God;’ to Locke’s among the rest. For it is in a sense true, as he held, that ‘my own real existence’ is evidence of the existence of God, since the self, in the only sense in which it is absolutely real or an ultimate subject, is already God. [1] [1] See below, paragraph 152. Locke’s proof of the real existence of God. There must have been something from eternity to cause what now is.