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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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The word reality in the conception of the thing, and the word existence in the conception of the predicate, will not help you out of the difficulty. Philosophers have always talked of an absolutely necessary being, and have nevertheless declined to take the trouble of conceiving whether--and how--a being of this nature is even cogitable, not to mention that its existence is actually demonstrable. For the principle of the former enounces, not that things themselves or substances, but only that which happens or their states--as empirically contingent, have a cause; the assertion that the existence of substance itself is contingent is not justified by experience, it is the assertion of a reason employing its principles in a speculative manner. Reflection tells us, that even our resembling perceptions are interrupted in their existence, and different from each other. Hence, in a conception of the pure understanding, the matter precedes the form, and for this reason Leibnitz first assumed the existence of things (monads) and of an internal power of representation in them, in order to found upon this their external relation and the community their state (that is, of their representations).