Anselm, Proslogion, 2—“Id, quo majus cogitari nequit, non potest esse in intellectu solo.” See translation of the Proslogion, in Bib. Sac., 1851:529, 699; Kant, Critique, 368. The arguments of Descartes and Anselm, with Kant’s reply, are given in their original form by Harris, in Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:420-428. The major premise here is not that all perfect ideas imply the existence of the object which they represent, for then, as Kant objects, I might argue from my perfect idea of a $100 bill that I actually possessed the same, which would be far from the fact. So I have a perfect idea of a perfectly evil being, of a centaur, of nothing,—but it does not follow that the evil being, that the centaur, that nothing, exists. The argument is rather from the idea of absolute and perfect Being—of “that, no greater than which can be conceived.” There can be but one such being, and there can be but one such idea. Yet, even thus understood, we cannot argue from the idea to the actual existence of such a being. Case, Physical Realism, 173—“God is not an idea, and consequently cannot be inferred from mere ideas.” Bowne, Philos. Theism, 43—The Ontological Argument “only points out that the idea of the perfect must include the idea of existence; but there is nothing to show that the self-consistent idea represents an objective reality.” I can imagine the Sea-serpent, the Jinn of the Thousand and One Nights, “The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.” The winged horse of Uhland possessed every possible virtue, and only one fault,—it was dead. If every perfect idea implied the reality of its object, there might be horses with ten legs, and trees with roots in the air. “Anselm’s argument implies,” says Fisher, in Journ. Christ. Philos., Jan. 1883:114, “that existence _in re_ is a constituent of the concept. It would conclude the existence of a being from the definition of a word. This inference is justified only on the basis of philosophical realism.” Dove, Logic of the Christ. Faith, 141—“The Ontological Argument is the algebraic formula of the universe, which leads to a valid conclusion with regard to real existence, only when we fill it in with objects with which we become acquainted in the arguments _a posteriori_.” See also Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:331, Dogm. Theol., 1:221-241, and in Presb. Rev., April, 1884:212-227 (favoring the argument); Fisher, Essays, 574; Thompson, Christian Theism, 171; H. B. Smith, Introd. to Christ. Theol., 122; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:181-187; Studien und Kritiken, 1875:611-655.