contingencies by relation to what is not contingent; he must suppose nature unchanging, though our experience of it through sensation be a ‘progressus ad indefinitum’--if he is to allow a possibility of knowledge at all. In short, if events were merely events, feelings that happen to me now and next moment are over, no ‘law of causation’ and therefore no knowledge would be possible. If the knowledge founded on this law actually exists, then the ‘argumentum a contingentiâ mundi’ rightly understood--the ‘inference’ from nature to a being neither in time nor contingent but self-dependent and eternal, that constant reality of which events are the changing appearances--is valid because the conception of nature, of a world to be known, already implies such a being. To the rejoinder that implication in the conception of nature does not prove real existence, the answer must be the question. What meaning has real existence, the antithesis of illusion, except such as is equivalent to this conception? [1] cf. Book II. chap. xxvi. sec. 1, and chap. xxi. sec. 1. The world which is to prove an eternal God must be itself eternal. 150. The value, then, of Locke’s demonstration of the existence of God, as an argument from there being something now to an eternal being from which the real existence that we know ‘has all which is in and belongs to it,’ depends on our converting it into the ‘argumentum a contingentiâ mundi,’ stated as above. In other words, it depends on our interpreting it in a manner which may be warranted by his rough account of causation, and by one of the incompatible views of the real that we have found in him, [1] but which is inconsistent with his opposition of reality to the work of the mind, and his reduction of it to ‘particular existence,’ as well as with his ordinary view that ‘infinite’ and ‘eternal’ can represent only a ‘progressus ad indefinitum.’ If by ‘real existence corresponding to an idea’ is meant its presentation in a particular ‘here and now,’ an attempt to find a real existence of God can bring us to nothing but such a contradiction in terms as a first event. To prove it from the real existence of the self is to prove one impossibility from another. If, on the other hand, real existence implies the determination of our ideas by an order of nature--if it means ideas ‘in ordine ad universum’ (to use a Baconian phrase), in distinction from ‘in ordine ad nos’--then the argument from a present to an eternal real existence is valid, but simply in the sense that the present is already real, and ‘has all that is in and belongs to it,’ only in virtue of the relation to the eternal. [1] See above, paragraphs 49 and 91. But will the God, whose existence is so proven, be a thinking being?