"What do you understand by God?" says he; "the perfect Being? He is the God of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz; he is the God of all the theologians with whom _Divinity_ and _Perfection_ are synonyms. That God is our God too. But if, of this God, immutable in his perfection, elevated beyond time, space, the movement of universal life, you make anything else than an ideal of the thought, I confess I no longer comprehend him. ... These ideas, all equally reducible to the idea of the _Perfect_, as understood by Plato, Descartes, Malebranche, Fénélon, Leibnitz, can have no _objective reality_, and only exist in the ideal order of pure thought; absolutely in the same manner as the figures of geometry do, which lose all the vigorousness and all the exactitude of their definition elsewhere than in the domain of the understanding. ... {386} Perfection exists, can only exist, in the thought. It is of the essence of perfection to be purely ideal; and the remark applies as truly to the Perfect Being of Descartes and of Leibnitz as to the 'intelligible world' of Plato and of Malebranche. A 'perfect God,' or a 'real God?' Theology must make its choice. A perfect God is only an ideal God." [Footnote 83] [Footnote 83: La Métaphysique et la science; vol. i, pp. xii, 1, vol. iii, p. 247.] That is to say, that for Metaphysics to admit God, the _Being_ God must vanish, and remain only a conception, a notion, an idea. It may be that to a philosopher or two this may seem still Theism; to the human soul, and to the human race, it is Atheism, and nothing else. God thus made to vanish, what becomes in its turn of the world? {387} Here God reappears. "As for the _real_ God," says M. Vacherot, "he lives, he develops himself in the immensity of space and in the eternity of time; he appears to us under the infinite variety of forms which are his manifestations--he is _Cosmos_. ... The world _thought of_ is something else than the world _imagined_. Imagination represents to us the world as an immense mass of dispersed matter, as an infinite collection of forces disseminated in the vast fields of space. The idea does not occur to men of vulgar minds, nor even to our men of learning, that this image of universal life cannot for an instant support the glance of reason; they do not perceive that _void_ is synonymous with _nothing_, that the atom is an unintelligible hypothesis; that _being_ is always and everywhere, without any possible solution of continuity, either in time or in space; that the universal life is one in its apparent dispersion; and finally, that the world is a _being_, and not merely a _whole_." [Footnote 84] [Footnote 84: La Métaphysique et la science, vol. iii, p. 247; vol. i, p. lii.] What is this if it be not Pantheism? {388}