It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of anything--Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define them as existing, and the proof is complete. But, this objection summarily set aside; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing. With greater justice, however, we may say, that of such terms as perfection and existence we know too little to speculate. Existence may be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know nothing about the matter. Such arguments are but endless _petitiones principii_--like the self-devouring serpent, resolving themselves into nothing. We wander round and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible point at which we can seize their meaning; but we are presented everywhere with the same impracticable surface, from which our grasp glides off ineffectual. Spinoza himself, however, obviously felt an intense conviction of the validity of his argument. His opinion is stated with sufficient distinctness in one of his letters. 'Nothing is more clear,' he writes to his pupil De Vries, 'than that, on the one hand, everything which exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other; that the more reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more attributes must be assigned to it;' 'and conversely' (and this he calls his _argumentum palmarium_ in proof of the existence of God), '_the more attributes I assign to a thing, the more I am forced to conceive it as existing_.' Arrange the argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form clearer than this:--The more perfect a thing is, the more it must exist (as if existence could admit of more or less); and therefore the all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. There is no flaw, we are told, in the reasoning; and if we are not convinced, it is from the confused habits of our own minds.