Читать книгу St. Anselme: Collected Works. Proslogium, Monologium, In Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilon & Cur Deus Homo онлайн

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“Kant, on the other hand, attacked and rejected Anselm’s proof ‑‑which rejection the whole world afterwards followed up ‑‑on the ground of its being an assumption that the unity of Being and thought is the highest perfection. What Kant thus demonstrates in the present day ‑‑that Being is different from thought and that Being is not by any means posited with thought ‑‑was a criticism offered even in that time by a monk named Gaunilo. He combated this proof of Anselm’s in a Liber pro insipiente to which Anselm himself directed a reply in his Liber apologeticus adversus insipientem. Thus Kant says (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, P. 464 of the sixth edition): If we think a hundred dollars, this conception does not involve existence. That is certainly true: what is only a conception does not exist, but it is likewise not a true content, for what does not exist, is merely an untrue conception. Of such we do not however here speak, but of pure thought; it is nothing new to say they are different ‑‑Anselm knew this just as well as we do. God is the infinite, just as body and soul, Being and thought are eternally united; this is the speculative, true definition of God. To the proof which Kant criticises in a manner which it is the fashion to follow now‑a‑days, there is thus lacking only the perception of the unity of thought and of existence in the infinite; and this alone must form the commencement.”

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