In stating the ontological argument the term perfection has been expressly emphasized, because it may be taken to embrace both truth and goodness. Owing to a habit of thought, due in the main to Plato, it was long customary to regard degrees of truth and goodness as interchangeable, and as equivalent to degrees of reality. The _ens realissimum_ was in its completeness the highest object both of the faculty of cognition and of the moral will. But even in the scholastic period these two different aspects of the ideal were clearly recognized, and led to sharply divergent tendencies. More recently they have been divided and embodied in separate arguments. _The epistemological_ argument _defines God in terms of that absolute truth which is referred to in every judgment_. Under the influence of idealism this absolute truth has taken the form of a universal mind, or all-embracing standard experience, called more briefly the absolute. The _ethical_ argument, on the other hand, conceives God as _the perfect goodness implied in the moral struggle, or the power through which goodness is made to triumph in the universe_ to the justification of moral faith. While the former of these arguments identifies God with being, the latter defines God in terms of the intent or outcome of being. Thus, while the epistemological argument does not distinguish God and the world, the latter does so, assuming that independent reality can be attributed to the stages of a process and to the purpose that dominates it. [Sidenote: The Cosmological Proof of God.] § 89. The _cosmological_ proof of God approaches him through the attribute of creative omnipotence. The common principle of causal explanation refers the origin of natural events to similar antecedent events. But there must be some _first cause_ from which the whole series is derived, a cause which is ultimate, sufficient to itself, and the responsible author of the world. Because God's function as creator was a part of the Christian teaching, and because explanation by causes is habitual with common sense, this argument has had great vogue. But in philosophy it has declined in importance, chiefly because it has been absorbed in arguments which deal with the _kind_ of causality proper to a first cause or world-ground. The argument that follows is a case in point. [Sidenote: The Teleological Proof of God.]