Dorner, in his Glaubenslehre, 1:197, gives us the best statement of the Ontological Argument: “Reason thinks of God as existing. Reason would not be reason, if it did not think of God as existing. Reason only is, upon the assumption that God is.” But this is evidently not argument, but only vivid statement of the necessary assumption of the existence of an absolute Reason which conditions and gives validity to ours. Although this last must be considered the most perfect form of the Ontological Argument, it is evident that it conducts us only to an ideal conclusion, not to real existence. In common with the two preceding forms of the argument, moreover, it tacitly assumes, as already existing in the human mind, that very knowledge of God’s existence which it would derive from logical demonstration. It has value, therefore, simply as showing what God must be, if he exists at all. But the existence of a Being indefinitely great, a personal Cause, Contriver and Lawgiver, has been proved by the preceding arguments; for the law of parsimony requires us to apply the conclusions of the first three arguments to one Being, and not to many. To this one Being we may now ascribe the infinity and perfection, the idea of which lies at the basis of the Ontological Argument—ascribe them, not because they are demonstrably his, but because our mental constitution will not allow us to think otherwise. Thus clothing him with all perfections which the human mind can conceive, and these in illimitable fullness, we have one whom we may justly call God. McCosh, Div. Govt., 12, note—“It is at this place, if we do not mistake, that the idea of the Infinite comes in. The capacity of the human mind to form such an idea, or rather its intuitive belief in an Infinite of which it feels that it cannot form an adequate conception, may be no proof (as Kant maintains) of the existence of an infinite Being; but it is, we are convinced, the means by which the mind is enabled to invest the Deity, shown on other grounds to exist, with the attributes of infinity, _i. e._, to look on his being, power, goodness, and all his perfections, as infinite.” Even Flint, Theism, 68, who holds that we reach the existence of God by inference, speaks of “necessary conditions of thought and feeling, and ineradicable aspirations, which force on us ideas of absolute existence, infinity, and perfection, and will neither permit us to deny these perfections to God, nor to ascribe them to any other being.” Belief in God is not the conclusion of a demonstration, but the solution of a problem. Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 226—“Either the whole question is assumed in starting, or the Infinite is not reached in concluding.”