existence of Deity is thus stated by Lewes:--"Interrogating his consciousness, he found that he had the idea of God, understanding by God, a substance infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent. This, to him, was as certain a truth as the truth of his own existence. I exist: not only do I exist, but exist as a miserably imperfect finite being, subject to change, greatly ignorant, and incapable of creating anything. In this, my consciousness, I find by my finitude that I am not the All; by my imperfection, that I am not perfect. Yet an infinite and perfect being must exist, because infinity and perfection are implied as correlatives in my ideas of imperfection and finitude. God therefore exists: his existence is clearly proclaimed in my consciousness, and can no more be a matter of doubt, when fairly considered, than my own existence. The conception of an infinite being proves his real existence; for if there is not really such a being, I must have made the conception; but if I could make it, I can also unmake it, which evidently is not true; therefore there must be, externally to myself an archetype from which the conception was derived. All that we clearly and distinctly conceive as contained in anything, is true of that thing. Now we conceive, clearly and distinctly, that the existence of God is contained in the idea we have of him--_Ergo_, God exists." It may not be out of place to note at this demonstration, that the Jesuit writer, Father Hardouin, in his "Atheists Unmasked," as a recompense for this demonstration of the existence of Deity, places Descartes and his disciples, le Grand and Regis, in the first rank of atheistical teachers. Voltaire, commenting on this, remarks, "The man who had devoted all the acuteness of his extraordinary intellect to the discovery of new proofs of the existence of a God, was most absurdly charged with denying him altogether." Speaking of the proof of the existence of Deity, "Demonstrations of this kind," says Froude, "were the characteristics of the period. Descartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza. The inconclusiveness of the method may perhaps be observed most readily in the strangely opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless agreed, by the same process, to gather each out of their ideas. It is important, however, to examine it carefully, for it is the very keystone of the Pantheistic system. As stated by Descartes, the argument stands something as follows:--God is an all-perfect Being, perfection is the idea which we form of Him, existence is a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists. The sophism, we are told, is only apparent, existence is part of the idea--as much involved in it as the equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a circle.