Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/256

 absolutely necessary Essence, or even from the characteristic of the Infinite, beyond which we have not gone, for all and every limitation contains a reference to an Other, and is consequently opposed to the characteristic of the Absolutely-necessary and Infinite.

The real illusion or fallacy in the mode of inference which is supposed to belong to this proof, is sought for by Kant in the proposition that every purely necessary Essence is at the same time the most real Essence, and he holds that this proposition is the nervus probandi of the Cosmological Proof. He seeks, however, to expose the fallacy by pointing out that, since a most real Essence is not one whit different from any other Essence, the proposition permits of being simply inverted, that is, any—and by this is meant the most real—Essence is absolutely necessary, or, in other words, the most real Essence which as such gets its determinate nature by means of the Notion, must also contain within it the characteristic of absolute necessity. This, however, is just the principle and method of the Ontological Proof of the existence of God, which consists in this, that it starts from the notion or conception, and passes by means of the conception to existence. The Cosmological Proof uses the Ontological as a prop, since it promises to conduct us by a new footpath, and yet after a short detour brings us back to the old one, the existence of which it refused to admit, and which we abandoned for its sake.

It will be seen that the objection does not touch the Cosmological Proof, either in so far as this latter merely attains by itself to the characteristic of something absolutely necessary, or in so far as it advances from this by way of development to the further characteristic of what is most real. So far as this connection between the two characteristics in question is concerned, it being the point against which Kant particularly directs his objections, we can see that it is quite in accordance with the nature of proof that the transition from one already established