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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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Please visit our web site for system requirements and additional features! 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. Our present purpose is to avail ourselves of this series of states or conditions as a guide to an existence which may be the highest condition of all changeable phenomena, that is, to a necessary being. When we exclude these sensible qualities there remains nothing in the universe, which has such an existence. The second proposition of the antithesis--that there exists in the world nothing that is simple--is here equivalent to the following; The existence of the absolutely simple cannot be demonstrated from any experience or perception either external or internal; and the absolutely simple is a mere idea, the objective reality of which cannot be demonstrated in any possible experience; it is consequently, in the exposition of phenomena, without application and object. At the same time, when we designate certain objects as phenomena or sensuous existences, thus distinguishing our mode of intuiting them from their own nature as things in themselves, it is evident that by this very distinction we as it were place the latter, considered in this their own nature, although we do not so intuite them, in opposition to the former, or, on the other hand, we do so place other possible things, which are not objects of our senses, but are cogitated by the understanding alone, and call them intelligible existences (noumena). Now as we cannot cognize completely a priori the existence of any object of sense, though we can do so comparatively a priori, that is, relatively to some other previously given existence--a cognition, however, which can only be of such an existence as must be contained in the complex of experience, of which the previously given perception is a part--the necessity of existence can never be cognized from conceptions, but always, on the contrary, from its connection with that which is an object of perception. Now we must admit that the doctrine of the existence of God belongs to doctrinal belief.