| All illusions in an argument are more easily detected when they are presented in the formal manner employed by the schools, which we now proceed to do. |
| If the proposition; "Every absolutely necessary being is likewise an ens realissimum," is correct (and it is this which constitutes the nervus probandi of the cosmological argument), it must, like all affirmative judgements, be capable of conversion--the conversio per accidens, at least. |
| It follows, then, that some entia realissima are absolutely necessary beings. |
| But no ens realissimum is in any respect different from another, and what is valid of some is valid of all. |
| In this present case, therefore, I may employ simple conversion, and say; "Every ens realissimum is a necessary being." But as this proposition is determined a priori by the conceptions contained in it, the mere conception of an ens realissimum must possess the additional attribute of absolute necessity. |
| But this is exactly what was maintained in the ontological argument, and not recognized by the cosmological, although it formed the real ground of its disguised and illusory reasoning. |
| Thus the second mode employed by speculative reason of demonstrating the existence of a Supreme Being, is not only, like the first, illusory and inadequate, but possesses the additional blemish of an ignoratio elenchi--professing to conduct us by a new road to the desired goal, but bringing us back, after a short circuit, to the old path which we had deserted at its call. |
| I mentioned above that this cosmological argument contains a perfect nest of dialectical assumptions, which transcendental criticism does not find it difficult to expose and to dissipate. |
| I shall merely enumerate these, leaving it to the reader, who must by this time be well practised in such matters, to investigate the fallacies residing therein. |
| The following fallacies, for example, are discoverable in this mode of proof; 1. The transcendental principle; "Everything that is contingent must have a cause"--a principle without significance, except in the sensuous world. |
| For the purely intellectual conception of the contingent cannot produce any synthetical proposition, like that of causality, which is itself without significance or distinguishing characteristic except in the phenomenal world. |
| But in the present case it is employed to help us beyond the limits of its sphere. |
| 2. "From the impossibility of an infinite ascending series of causes in the world of sense a first cause is inferred"; a conclusion which the principles of the employment of reason do not justify even in the sphere of experience, and still less when an attempt is made to pass the limits of this sphere. |
| 3. Reason allows itself to be satisfied upon insufficient grounds, with regard to the completion of this series. |
| It removes all conditions (without which, however, no conception of Necessity can take place); and, as after this it is beyond our power to form any other conceptions, it accepts this as a completion of the conception it wishes to form of the series. |
| 4. The logical possibility of a conception of the total of reality (the criterion of this possibility being the absence of contradiction) is confound. |
| ed with the transcendental, which requires a principle of the practicability of such a synthesis--a principle which again refers us to the world of experience. |
| And so on. |
| The aim of the cosmological argument is to avoid the necessity of proving the existence of a necessary being priori from mere conceptions--a proof which must be ontological, and of which we feel ourselves quite incapable. |
| With this purpose, we reason from an actual existence--an experience in general, to an absolutely necessary condition of that existence. |
| It is in this case unnecessary to demonstrate its possibility. |