________________
ing to the
world at a
of time.
therefore absolutely necessary Being exists. It starts from the thought that the world as presented to our immediate experience has in it no substantiality or
Certain anoindependence. Its existence cannot be malies pointexplained from itself and the mind in origin trying to account for it is forced to certai fall back in something outside of it and finds rest only in the idea of a Being who is necessarily self-dependent and substantial. The movement of thought which this argument involves may be stated in various ways and under different categories. It may be put as an argument from the world viewed as an effect to the first cause or more generally from the world viewed as finite and relative to an Absolute and Infinite Being on whom it rests. But in all these and other forms, the gist of the argument is the same. If we take it, for example, in the form in which it turns on the idea of causality, it is the argument that whatever does not exist necessarily exist only through another Being as its cause and that again itself not necessary through
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