Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/252

 dialectic element which it is necessary to carry through and pass judgment upon. For the rest, the particular mode in which the mediation in those metaphysical lines of argument, as well as that belonging to Kant’s estimate of them, is to be conceived of, is, as a whole, the same; and this is true of all the separate proofs of the existence of God, that is, of all those belonging to the class which starts from some given form of existence. And if we here look more closely at the nature of this syllogism of the Understanding, we shall have also settled its character so far as the other proofs are concerned, and in dealing with them we shall have to direct our attention merely to the content of the characteristics in its more definite form.

The consideration of Kant’s criticism of the Cosmological Proof comes to be all the more interesting from the fact that, according to Kant, this proof has concealed in it “a whole nest of dialectic assumptions, which, nevertheless, transcendental criticism is able to lay bare and destroy.” I shall first restate this proof in the form in which it is usually expressed, which is the one employed by Kant, and which runs thus: If anything exists—not merely exists, but exists a contingentia mundi, is defined as contingent—then some absolutely necessary Essence must exist as well. Now I myself at least exist, and therefore an absolutely rational Essence exists. Kant remarks, first of all, that the minor term contains something derived from experience, and that the major term concludes from experience in general that something necessary exists; that consequently the proof is not carried through in an absolutely a priori way, a remark which connects itself with what was mentioned before as to the general nature of this style of argument, which takes up merely one aspect of the total true mediation.

The next remark has reference to a point of supreme importance in connection with this style of argument, and which Kant expresses in the following form. The necessary Essence can be characterised as necessary only