Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/258

 The characteristic of absolutely necessary Essence involves the necessity partly of its Being, partly of the characteristics of its content. If it be asked what is implied in the further predicate, the all-embracing, unlimited reality, the reply is that this question has no reference to Being as such, but to what is to be further distinguished as the characteristic of the content. In the Cosmological Proof, Being has already a definite existence of its own, and the question as to how we pass from absolute necessity to the All-Reality, and back from the latter to the former, has reference to this content only, and not to Being. Kant finds the defect of the Ontological Proof in the fact that in connection with its fundamental characteristic, the All of realities, Being is likewise conceived of as a reality. In the Cosmological Proof, however, we have already this Being elsewhere. Inasmuch as it adds the characteristic of All-Reality to what is for it absolutely necessary, it does not at all require that Being should be characterised as reality, and that it should be comprised in that All-Reality.

Kant in his criticism begins by taking the advance of the characteristic of the Absolutely-necessary to unlimited reality only in this sense, since, as was previously indicated, for him the point of this advance is the discovery of the attributes possessed by the absolutely necessary Essence, as the Cosmological Proof in itself has made only one step in advance, namely, to the existence of an absolutely necessary Essence in general, but cannot tell us what kind of attributes this Essence possesses. We must therefore hold that Kant is in error in asserting that the Cosmological Proof rests on the Ontological, and we must regard it as a mistake even to maintain that it requires this latter to complete it, that is, in regard to what it has in general to accomplish. That more, however, has to be accomplished than it accomplishes, is a matter for further consideration, and this further step is undoubtedly taken in the moment contained in the Ontological