Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller

nevertheless so simple and natural, that the commonest understanding accepts it, if once led up to it. We see things change, arise and perish, and these, or at least their state, must therefore have a cause. Of [p. 590] every cause, however, that is given in experience, the same question must be asked. Where, therefore, could we more fairly place the last causality, except where there exists also the supreme causality, that is in that Being, which originally contains in itself the sufficient cause for every possible effect, and the concept of which can easily \ be realised by the one trait of an all-comprehending per- [ fection .'* That supreme cause we afterwards consider as absolutely necessary, because we find it absolutely necessary to ascend to it, while there is no ground for going beyond it. Thus among all nations, even when still in a state of blind polytheism, we always see some sparks of monotheism, to which they have been led, not by meditation and profound speculation, but by the natural bent of the common understanding, which they gradually followed and comprehended.

There are only three kinds of proofs of the existence of God from speculative reason.

All the paths that can be followed to this end begin either from definite experience and the peculiar nature of the world of sense, known to us through experience, and ascend from it, according to the laws of causality, to the highest cause, existing outside the world ; or they rest on indefinite experience only, that is, on any existence which is empirically given ; or lastly, they leave all experience out of account, and conclude, entirely a priori from mere concepts, the existence of a supreme [p. 591] cause. The first proof is t\\Q physico-theological, the second

Transcendental Dialectic 477

the cosmologicaly the third the ontological proof. There are no more, and there can be no more.

_I_sjhall show that neither on the one path, the empirical, jiQT on the other, the transcendental, can reason achieve ^anything, and that it stretches its wings in vain, if it tries to soar beyond the world of sense by the mere power of speculation. With regard to the order in which these three arguments should be examined, it will be the opposite of that, followed by reason in its gradual development, in which we placed them also at first ourselves. For we shall be able to show that, although experience gives the first impulse, it is the transcendental concept only which guides reason in its endeavours, and fixes the last goal which reason wishes to retain. I shall therefore begin with the examination of the transcendental proof, and see afterwards how far it may be strengthened by the addition of empirical elements.

THE IDEAL OF PURE REASON [p. 592]

Section IV

Of the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof_pf the Existence of God

It is easily perceived, from what has been said before, ' that the concept of an absolutely necessary Being is a con- ' cept of pure reason, that is, a mere idea, the objective reality of whicir"is by no means proved by the fact that reason requires it^ That idea does no more than point to , a certain but unattainable completeness, and serves rather to lirnit the understanding, than to extend its sphere. It seems strange and absurd, however, that a conclusion of

47^ Transcendental Dialectic an absolutely necessary existence from a given existence in general should seem urgent and correct, and that yet all the conditions under which the understanding can form a concept of such a necessity should be entirfilyi^^gaiiisl us.

People have at all times been talking of an absolutely \ necessary Being, but they have tried, not so much to understand whether and how a thing of that kind could even be

/ conceived, as rather to prove its existence. No doubt a verbal definition of that concept is quite easy, if we say that it is something the non-existence of which is imposr^^ble. This, however, does not make us much [p. 593] wiser with reference to the conditions that make it necessary^ to consider the non-existence of a thing as absolutely inconceivable. It is these conditions which we want to know, and whether by that concept we are thinking anything or not. For to use the word unconditioned^ in order to get rid of all the conditions which the understanding always requires, when wishing to conceive something as necessary, does not render it clear to us in the least whether, after that, we are still thinking anything or perhaps nothing, by the concept of the unconditionally necessary.

Nay, more than this, people have imagined that by a number of examples they had explained this concept, at first risked at haphazard, and afterwards become quite familiar, and that therefore all further inquiry regarding its intelligibility were unnecessary. It was said that every proposition of geometry, such as, for instance, that a triangle has three angles, is absolutely necessary, and

1 Read nothwendig instead of unmoglich. Noire.

Transcende7ital Dialectic 4yg

people began to talk of an object entirely outside the sphere of our understanding, as if they understood perfectly well what, by that concept, they wished to predicate of it.