Thus the ontological argument identifies the logical and the real. But the illicit procedure in which it indulges would be more apparent than it is to _à priori_ theorists, if the object they imagine they have reached were visible in nature, and apprehensible by the senses. To pass from the ideal to the real sphere by a transcendant act of thought is seen at once to be unwarrantable in the case of sense-perception. In this case, it is the presence of the object that alone warrants the transition, else we should have as much right to believe in the real existence of the hippogriff as in the reality of the horse. But when the object is invisible, and is at the same time the supreme being in the universe, the speculative thinker is more easily deceived. We must, therefore, in every instance ask him, where is the bridge from the notion to the reality? What is the plank thrown across the chasm which separates these two regions, (to use an old philosophical phrase) 'by the whole diameter of being?' We can never, by any vault of logic pass from the one to the other. We are imprisoned within the region of mere subjectivity in all _à priori_ demonstration, and how to escape from it, is (as we said before) the very problem to be solved. Anselm, who was the first to formulate the ontological proof, argued that our idea of God is the idea of a being than whom we can conceive nothing greater. But inasmuch as real existence is greater than mere thought, the existence of God is guaranteed in the very idea of the most perfect being; otherwise the contradiction of one still more perfect would emerge. The error of Anselm was the error of his age, the main blot in the whole mediæval philosophy. It first seemed to him that reason and instinctive faith were separated by a wide interval. He then wished to have a reason for his faith, cast in the form of a syllogism. And he failed to see, or adequately to understand, that all demonstrative reasoning hangs upon axiomatic truths which cannot be demonstrated, not because they are inferior to reason, but because they are superior to reasoning--the pillars upon which all ratiocination rests. This was his first mistake. Dissatisfied with the data upon which all reasoning hangs, he preferred the stream to the fountain-head, while he thought (contradictory as it is) that _by going down the stream_ he could reach the fountain! But his second mistake was the greater of the two. He confounded the necessities of thought with the necessities of the universe. He passed _without a warrant_ from his own subjective thought to the region of objective reality. And it has been the same with all who have since followed him in this ambitious path. But after witnessing the elaborate tortures to which the mediæval theologians subjected their intellects in the process, we see their powers fail, and the chasm still yawning between the abstract notions of the mind and the concrete facts of the universe.