vicissitudes and conflicts of our existence. And, such being the outcome of history, we have to take it as really the meaning of the great Frenchman's formulæ. We put aside the controversy, then, with the simple reflection that results in history or anywhere else are at least very hard indeed to conceive if they are anything more or less than realized motives [p.188] perhaps the realized motives of a man or men building somewhat beyond their clearest knowledge. Whatever has come about must always be what more or less clearly men have been feeling after. The God whom Descartes really proves to his time, and still more positively to us, must surely be the God not of a satisfied unquestioning believer, but of the universal doubter who loves truth and whose doubting and loving make him the always curious thinker; a God without visibly or even quasi-visibly fixed or specific character of any sort, since with his nature set to such a character, tethered like a beast to a stake or like the sun bound to an orbit, he would not be and could not be divine enough--which is to say, veracious or perfect enough--for a universal doubter's curiosity; a God, then, who has the divine character of true infinity, who is, too, a spirit in fact as well as in word. Infinity certainly cannot belong to a being that is apart; such a being would at once belie his nature; and "spirits," divine or human, must not be supposed to be, like Elijah, the merely translated beings of this visible and tangible world, for they can belong only to the invisible and the intangible, which is in this world and of it, in its knowledge, in its love and strife, in its changes of all kinds, in its work and in its suffering. Yes, a truly living God, living here and now, is the God of Descartes' proof; the God of just that world of movement and conflict, of poise and reality, to which the differences and above all the contradictions of experience, as examined by us in preceding chapters, have already borne witness. Let us recall how we were able to say that the very conflicts of human [p.189] experience were the wisdom of God. And if this all amounts to saying, as apparently it does, that only Descartes' universal doubter, who loves truth too much ever to claim its final possession, can believe in a real God, then we have reached something that will surely repay the most careful reflection.