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Click on the phrases to see them in context. The original texts by Immanuel Kant and David Hume are available from the Gutenberg Projet.

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We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but it is in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.

 Fourthly, the conceptions of the possible, the actual, and the necessary do not conduct us to any series--excepting only in so far as the contingent in existence must always be regarded as conditioned, and as indicating, according to a law of the understanding, a condition, under which it is necessary to rise to a higher, till in the totality of the series, reason arrives at unconditioned necessity. Now, I may admit the existence of an incomprehensible being of this nature--the object of a mere idea, relatively to the world of sense; although I have no ground to admit its existence absolutely and in itself. But there are other considerations which compel reason to seek out some resting place in the regress from the conditioned to the unconditioned, which is not given as an actual existence from the mere conception of it, although it alone can give completeness to the series of conditions. The transition from the non-being of a state into the existence of it, supposing that this state contains no quality which previously existed in the phenomenon, is a fact of itself demanding inquiry. [*Footnote; We can easily conceive the non-existence of matter; but the ancients did not thence infer its contingency. 
  • Now the difficulty still remains, how to form an idea of this object or existence, without having recourse to the secondary and sensible qualities.
 By it alone we could, therefore, never determine whether this manifold, as an object of experience, is coexistent or successive, unless it had for a foundation something fixed and permanent, of the existence of which all succession and coexistence are nothing but so many modes (modi of time). Consequently, the determination of my existence in time is possible only through the existence of real things external to me. [*Footnote; The "I think" expresses the act of determining my own existence.