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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
However I try to explain the reality of things outside God, I have to confess that I can form no conception of it.
If it is called ‘the complement of possibility’, I ask: Is there a concept of this complement of possibility in God or not? Who will venture to assert that there is not? But if there is a concept of it in him, then the thing itself is in him too: all things in him are themselves real.
But, it will be said, the concept which God has of the reality of a thing does not preclude the reality of this thing outside him. Does it not? Then the reality outside him must have something which distinguishes it from the reality in his concept of it. That is, there must be something in the reality outside him of which God has no conception. An absurdity! But if there is nothing of this kind, if, in the concept which God has of the reality of a thing, everything is present that is to be found in its reality outside him, then the two realities are one, and everything which is supposed to exist outside God exists in God.
Or it may be said that the reality of a thing is the sum of all possible attributes that may pertain to it. Must not this sum also be present in the idea that God has of it?
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