 There is, Maritain writes, an intuition that is awakened in persons when they are engaged in thought—that is, that it seems impossible that they, as thinking beings, should at some time have not been. As a thinking being, one seems to be free from the vicissitudes of time and space; there is no coming to be or ceasing to be—I cannot think what it is not to be. Nevertheless, we all know very well that we were born—we came into existence. We are confronted, then, with a contradiction—not a logical contradiction, but a lived contradiction. The only solution to this is that one has always existed, but not through oneself, but within “a Being of transcendent personality” and from whom “the self which is thinking now proceeded into temporal existence” (Approches de Dieu, in Oeuvres complètes, Vol. X, p. 64 [Engl. tr., pp. 71–72]). This being 