| Detection and Explanation of the Dialectical Illusion in all Transcendental Arguments for the Existence of a Necessary Being. |
| Both of the above arguments are transcendental; in other words, they do not proceed upon empirical principles. |
| For, although the cosmological argument professed to lay a basis of experience for its edifice of reasoning, it did not ground its procedure upon the peculiar constitution of experience, but upon pure principles of reason--in relation to an existence given by empirical consciousness; utterly abandoning its guidance, however, for the purpose of supporting its assertions entirely upon pure conceptions. |
| Now what is the cause, in these transcendental arguments, of the dialectical, but natural, illusion, which connects the conceptions of necessity and supreme reality, and hypostatizes that which cannot be anything but an idea? |
| What is the cause of this unavoidable step on the part of reason, of admitting that some one among all existing things must be necessary, while it falls back from the assertion of the existence of such a being as from an abyss? |
| And how does reason proceed to explain this anomaly to itself, and from the wavering condition of a timid and reluctant approbation--always again withdrawn--arrive at a calm and settled insight into its cause? |
| It is something very remarkable that, on the supposition that something exists, I cannot avoid the inference that something exists necessarily. |
| Upon this perfectly natural--but not on that account reliable--inference does the cosmological argument rest. |
| But, let me form any conception whatever of a thing, I find that I cannot cogitate the existence of the thing as absolutely necessary, and that nothing prevents me--be the thing or being what it may--from cogitating its non-existence. |
| I may thus be obliged to admit that all existing things have a necessary basis, while I cannot cogitate any single or individual thing as necessary. |
| In other words, I can never complete the regress through the conditions of existence, without admitting the existence of a necessary being; but, on the other hand, I cannot make a commencement from this being. |
| If I must cogitate something as existing necessarily as the basis of existing things, and yet am not permitted to cogitate any individual thing as in itself necessary, the inevitable inference is that necessity and contingency are not properties of things themselves- otherwise an internal contradiction would result; that consequently neither of these principles are objective, but merely subjective principles of reason--the one requiring us to seek for a necessary ground for everything that exists, that is, to be satisfied with no other explanation than that which is complete a priori, the other forbidding us ever to hope for the attainment of this completeness, that is, to regard no member of the empirical world as unconditioned. |
| In this mode of viewing them, both principles, in their purely heuristic and regulative character, and as concerning merely the formal interest of reason, are quite consistent with each other. |
| The one says; "You must philosophize upon nature," as if there existed a necessary primal basis of all existing things, solely for the purpose of introducing systematic unity into your knowledge, by pursuing an idea of this character--a foundation which is arbitrarily admitted to be ultimate; while the other warns you to consider no individual determination, concerning the existence of things, as such an ultimate foundation, that is, as absolutely necessary, but to keep the way always open for further progress in the deduction, and to treat every determination as determined by some other. |
| But if all that we perceive must be regarded as conditionally necessary, it is impossible that anything which is empirically given should be absolutely necessary. |
| It follows from this that you must accept the absolutely necessary as out of and beyond the world, inasmuch as it is useful only as a principle of the highest possible unity in experience, and you cannot discover any such necessary existence in the would, the second rule requiring you to regard all empirical causes of unity as themselves deduced. |
| The philosophers of antiquity regarded all the forms of nature as contingent; while matter was considered by them, in accordance with the judgement of the common reason of mankind, as primal and necessary. |
| But if they had regarded matter, not relatively--as the substratum of phenomena, but absolutely and in itself--as an independent existence, this idea of absolute necessity would have immediately disappeared. |
| For there is nothing absolutely connecting reason with such an existence; on the contrary, it can annihilate it in thought, always and without self-contradiction. |
| But in thought alone lay the idea of absolute necessity. |
| A regulative principle must, therefore, have been at the foundation of this opinion. |