The Collaborative International Dictionary
Self-existent \Self`-ex*ist"ent\, a. Existing of or by himself, independent of any other being or cause; -- as, God is the only self-existent being.
Wiktionary
a. 1 Existing without having been created. 2 Existing independent of any extrinsic sustaining force.
Usage examples of "self-existent".
The people can be sovereign only in the sense in which they exist and act. The people are not God, whatever some theorists may pretend--are not independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing.
When he had elevated his mind to the sublime contemplation of the first self-existent, necessary cause of the universe, the Athenian sage was incapable of conceiving how the simple unity of his essence could admit the infinite variety of distinct and successive ideas which compose the model of the intellectual world.
Or we may speak of the macrocosm, or great world, as the Grand Man, and we may say that the Soul of this Grand Man, the self-existent, substantial, and efficient cause of all things, at once immanent within yet transcending all things, is God.
That there is no creature now tenanting Bedlam who would or could scribble purer nonsense about God than this of Newton’s, we are well convinced—for how could the most frenzied of brains imagine anything more repugnant to every principle of good sense than a self-existent, eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent Being, creator of all the worlds, who acts the part of ‘universal emperor,’ and plays upon an infinitely larger scale, the same sort of game as Nicholas of Russia, or Mohammed of Egypt, plays upon a small scale.