Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/263

 dealt with when we come to consider Kant’s criticism of the Ontological Proof.

To this criticism Kant adds (p. 642) the “discovery” and “explanation”—made in his peculiar style—of the dialectic illusion which exists in all transcendental proofs of the existence of a necessary Essence, an explanation which contains nothing new; and then we have in Kant’s usual fashion an incessant repetition of what is always one and the same assurance, namely, that we cannot think the Thing-in-itself.

He calls the Cosmological Proof, as he does the Ontological, a transcendental proof, because it is independent of empirical principles; that is to say, it is supposed to be established, not by reasoning from any particular quality of experience whatsoever, but from pure principles of reason, and even abandons that method of deduction according to which existence is given through empirical consciousness, in order to base itself on what are simply pure conceptions. What better method indeed could philosophical proof adopt than that of basing itself only on pure conceptions? Kant, on the contrary, in speaking thus, intends to say the very worst he possibly can of this proof. So far, however, as the dialectic illusion is concerned, the discovery of which is here made by Kant, we find it to consist in the fact that while I must indeed allow that existence in general has a necessary element in it, no single thing can, on the other hand, be thought of as necessary in itself, and that I can never complete the act of going back to the conditions of existence without assuming the existence of something necessary while I can at the same time never start from this.

It must in justice be allowed that this remark contains the essential moment on which the whole question turns. What is necessary in itself must show that it has its beginning in itself, and must be conceived of in such a way as to allow of its being proved that its beginning is in itself. This requirement is indeed the only