Note 248 — LECTURE XVI. GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF THE IDEA OF THE GOOD.

Fragments de Philosophie Cartésienne, p. 24: "The infinite being, inasmuch as infinite, is not a mover, a cause; neither is he, inasmuch as infinite, an intelligence; neither is he a will; neither is he a principle of justice, nor much less a principle of love. We have no right to impute to him all these attributes in virtue of the single argument that every contingent being supposes a being that is not so, that every finite supposes an infinite. The God given by this argument is the God of Spinoza, is rigorously so; but he is almost as though he were not, at least for us who with difficulty perceive him in the inaccessible heights of an eternity and existence that are absolute, void of thought, of liberty, of love, similar to nonentity itself, and a thousand times inferior, in his infinity and eternity, to an hour of our finite and perishable existence, if during this fleeting hour we know what we are, if we think, if we love something else than ourselves, if we feel capable of freely sacrificing to an idea the few minutes that have been accorded to us."