"“So far from holding God to be finite, I hold, and in the book clearly teach, that all minds are infinite (in the true qualitative sense of the word), and God preeminently so. (See my pp. 330 seq., 363, and 373). Eternity, self-existence, self-activity, freedom, and infinity are to me all interchangeable terms, and are so treated wherever they turn up in the course of the book. My reviewer falls into a non sequitur when he concludes that I make God finite because I make him one of a community of spirits, each absolutely real; not God's finitude, but his definiteness, is what follows from that. This confusion of the definite with the finite is very common, and is the explanation of two tendencies in sceptical thinking — the tendency to deny the personality of God, whose infinity is supposed to mean his utter indefiniteness, and the tendency, in recoil from the former, to assert God's finitude in order to save his personality, which of course must be definite. But the true infinite, as distinguished from the pseudo-infinite, the infinite of quality in contrast to the infinite of quantity, is entirely definite; more definite, indeed, than any finite can be.”"
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George Holmes Howison
George Holmes Howison (29 November 1834 – 31 December 1916) was an American philosopher, who established the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley and held the position there of Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity.He also founded the Philosophical Union, one of the oldest philosophical organizations in the United States.
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