THE EXISTENCE OF GOD.--Although Descartes rests on God as being his first principle, he does not fail to prove His existence, and that is begging the question, something proved by what has to be proved. For if Descartes believed only in something outside himself because of a good God, that Being outside himself, God, he can prove only because of the existence of a good God, who cannot deceive us, and thus is God proved by the belief in Him. That is begging the question. Descartes does not fail to prove the existence of God by superabundance as it were; and this, too, in itself indicates clearly that faith in God is the very foundation of the philosophy of Descartes. After having taken it as the basis of reasoning, he takes it as the goal of reasoning, which indicates that the idea of God, so to speak, encircled his mind and that he found it at every ultimate point of thought. He proves it, therefore, first by an argument analogous to that of St. Anselm, which is this: we, imperfect and finite, have the idea of a perfect and infinite Being; we are not capable of this idea. Therefore it must have come to us from a Being really perfect and infinite, and hence this perfect Being exists. Another proof, that of God regarded as cause. First: I exist. Who made me? Was it myself? No, if it had been myself I should have endowed myself with all the perfections of which I can conceive and in which I am singularly deficient. Therefore it must be some other being who created me. It was my parents. No doubt, but who created my parents and the parents of my parents? One cannot go back indefinitely from cause to cause, and there must have been a first one. Secondly: even my own actual existence, my existence at this very moment, is it the result of my existence yesterday? Nothing proves it, and there is no necessity because I existed just now that I should exist at present. There must therefore be a cause at each moment and a continuous cause. That continuous cause is God, and the whole world is a creation perpetually continued, and is only comprehensible as continuous creation and is only explicable by a Creator.