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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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It is certainly allowable to admit the existence of an all-sufficient being--a cause of all possible effects--for the purpose of enabling reason to introduce unity into its mode and grounds of explanation with regard to phenomena. We find by experience, that there is such a constancy in almost all the impressions of the senses, that their interruption produces no alteration on them, and hinders them not from returning the same in appearance and in situation as at their first existence. The idea of a fundamental power, the existence of which no effort of logic can assure us of, is the problem to be solved, for the systematic representation of the existing variety of powers. There is no object, which implies the existence of any other if we consider these objects in themselves, and never look beyond the ideas which we form of them. The very same grounds of proof which established in the thesis the existence of a supreme being, demonstrated in the antithesis--and with equal strictness--the non-existence of such a being. Fourthly, if we assume the existence of an absolutely necessary being--whether it be the world or something in the world, or the cause of the world--we must place it in a time at an infinite distance from any given moment; for, otherwise, it must be dependent on some other and higher existence. (This I am willing to grant for the present, although the existence of a conception which is not self-contradictory is far from being sufficient to prove the possibility of an object.)* Now the notion of all reality embraces in it that of existence; the notion of existence lies, therefore, in the conception of this possible thing.