Rationalistic Spiritualism affirms the existence of God, and those who follow this system evince the strongest desire to demonstrate his existence. They are right; for the existence of God, and the rational consequences of his existence, form all their natural religion, all their religious philosophy. In these days, men of minds, as eminent as sincere, M. Émile Saisset, M. Jules Simon, M. Ernest Bersot, M. de Rémusat, have made earnest--I would willingly say pious--efforts to elucidate the proposition of God's existence, and to derive from it all the aid that reason can furnish to explain the instincts and satisfy the religious exigencies of humanity. But these Spiritualists deceive themselves. They do not attain to God himself, they only attain to the idea of God; what they establish is the admissibility of the intellectual idea, not the presence of a real being. {186} In rejecting the psychological and historical facts upon which Christianity is founded, that is to say, the relations free and unintermitted of God with Man, whether in the individual life of each man or in the history of the mankind, Rationalistic Spiritualism deprives itself of direct and positive evidence to prove God's existence; it places a human argument in the place of the divine manifestation, and a scientific work of man in the place of the real action of God. In an excellent book, justly entitled by him "Idea of God," another contemporary philosopher, M. Caro, has valiantly, and with brilliant success, defended this idea against the different systems which reject or distort it. And not limiting himself to polemics, he has concluded his work by a forcible and clear enunciation of his own thought. {187} "It is the living God, the intelligent God, whom we defend against the God of Naturalism, who would not be more than a law of geometry or a blind force; against the God of Hegel, who would not be more than an indeterminate Being, an origin and a commencement of things, or an absolute mind, result at once and product of the world; against the God of the new Idealists, who, to save his divinity, strip him of his reality. We affirm, in opposition to all these subtle and hazardous conceptions, that a supposed perfect being, unless he had an existence, would not be perfect; that a mere ideal of the mind is not a God; that if he is not a substance he is but a conception, a pure category of spirit, a creation and dependence upon man's thought which, in ceasing to exist, annihilates its God; that, if he is not cause, he is the most useless of beings; and if he is cause, he is mind supreme, for were he not so he would be nothing but an unconscious and necessary agent, a blind spring of the world, inferior to what he produces, since in the organic matter that emanates from him, an intelligence displays itself, of which he would possess nothing, and since too in man is manifested a divine Reason. {188}