The unity, therefore, of all human reason affords a complete demonstration of the existence of God. The universal reason is; but universal reason is an unmeaning word, unless it denote an intelligent, active being, a being by essence, the producer of all beings, of all intelligences, the cause of all, and the light of all. 158. _Impersonal reason_, of which some philosophers speak, is an unmeaning word. Either there exists a reason distinct from ours, or there does not: if it does exist, it is not impersonal; if it does not exist, it is impossible to explain the community of human reason: this community would be to us a phenomenon, which we might call impersonal reason, or any thing else we pleased, without it therefore being possible for us to assign it any origin: it would be an effect without a cause; a fact without a sufficient reason. 159. The understanding extends to a world of possibilities, and there discovers a connection of necessary relations, some of dependence, others of contradiction: but if there were no reality whereon to found the possibility, this would be an absurdity; if nothing existed, nothing would be possible. Upon nothing, nothing can be founded; consequently, not even possibility. The connection of necessary relations which we discover in possible beings, must have a primitive type to which they refer: but in nothing there are no types. 160. The assemblage of human understandings cannot establish possibility. No one of them considered isolately is necessary to general truth; and all together cannot have what no one of them has. We conceive necessary truth, absolutely abstracted from the human understanding: individual understandings appear and disappear, but work no change in the relations of possible beings: on the contrary, the understanding needs, in order to exercise its functions, a collection of pre-existing truths, and without them it cannot work. What any one individual understanding requires, all require. Their union does not increase the strength of each one: since this union is nothing more than an assemblage formed in our mind, and may not correspond to any thing in reality except the individual understandings, and their respective strength. 161. Necessary truths, therefore, exist before human reason; but their pre-existence is an unmeaning word, if they be not referred to a being, the origin of all reality, and the foundation of all possibility. There is then no impersonal reason properly so called; there is a community of reason in so far as one and the same light illumines all finite intelligences; God the creator of them all. CHAPTER XXVI. REMARKS ON THE REAL FOUNDATION OF PURE POSSIBILITY.