Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/265

 which are partly merely empirical and finite, but are also partly that Thing-in-itself which is incapable of manifesting itself—rather than to reason, which, even as understood by Kant, is the faculty which deals with ideas, with the Unconditioned and the Infinite. But in truth reason can in any case bear the weight of the contradiction, and can certainly solve it too; and things, at all events, know how to bear it, or rather, we should say, they are only contradiction in the form of existence; and this is true of that Kantian schema of the Thing-in-itself quite as much as of empirical things, and only in so far as they are rational can they solve it directly within themselves.

In Kant’s criticism of the Cosmological Proof those moments are at least discussed on which the point at issue really turns. We have noted two circumstances connected with this criticism: first, that the Cosmological Argument starts from Being as a presupposition, and from this goes on to the content, to the conception of God; and second, that Kant finds fault with the line of argument on the ground that it rests on the Ontological Proof, i.e., on the Proof in which the conception is presupposed, and in which we advance from this conception to Being. Since, according to the standpoint we at present occupy in conducting our investigation, the conception of God has no further determinate quality than that of the Infinite, it follows that what we are concerned with is, speaking generally, the Being of the Infinite. In accordance with the distinction previously referred to, in the one instance it is Being from which we start, and which has to get a determinate character as the Infinite; and in the other it is the Infinite from which we start, and which has to get a determinate character as having Being. Further, in the Cosmological Proof finite Being appears as a starting-point adopted empirically. The Proof essentially sets out from experience, as Kant says (p. 633), in order to lay a really firm foundation for itself.