Part 2 / Book 2 — CHAPTER III THE IDEAL OF PURE REASON

SECTIONS I and II THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAL[1601]

THE statements of the first section cannot profitably be commented upon at this stage; they are of a merely general character.[1602] I pass at once to Section II., which, as above stated, is quite the most archaic piece of rationalistic argument in the entire Critique. It is not merely Leibnizian, but Wolffian in character. For Kant the Wolffian logic had an old-time flavour and familiarity that rendered it by no means distasteful; and he is here, as it were, recalling, not altogether without sympathy, the lessons of his student years. They enable him to render definite, by way of contrast, the outcome of his own Critical teaching.

As Kant here restates the Wolffian notion of the Ens realissimum in such fashion as is required to make it conform to his deduction of the theological Idea from the disjunctive syllogism, a preliminary statement of the more orthodox formulation will help to set Wolff’s doctrine in a clearer light. In so doing, I shall follow Baumgarten, whose Metaphysica Kant used as a class text-book. Briefly summarised Baumgarten’s statement is as follows.[1603] The Ens perfectissimum is that Being which possesses as many predicates, i.e. perfections, as can possibly exist together in a single thing, and in which every one of its perfections is as great as is anywhere possible. This most perfect Being must be a real Being, and its reality must be the greatest possible. It is that in which the most and the greatest realities are. But all realities are affirmative determinations, and no denial is a reality. Accordingly no reality can contradict another reality, and all realities can exist together in the same thing. The Ens perfectissimum, in possessing all the realities that can exist together, must therefore possess all realities without exception, and every one of them in the highest degree. The notion of an individual existence that is at once perfectissimum and also realissimum is thus determinable by pure Reason from its internal resources. It is the ground and condition of all other existences; all of them arise through limitation of its purely positive nature.

Kant seeks to justify his metaphysical deduction of the Ideal from the disjunctive syllogism, by recasting the above argument in the following manner. Since everything which exists is completely determined, it is subject to the principle of complete determination, according to which one of each of the possible pairs of contradictory predicates must be applicable to it. To be completely determined the thing must be compared with the sum total of all possible predicates. Although this idea of the sum total of all possible predicates, through reference to which alone any concept can be completely determined, seems itself indeterminate, we find nevertheless on closer examination that it individualises itself a priori, transforming itself into the concept of an individual existence that is completely determined by the mere Idea, and which may therefore be called an Ideal of pure Reason. That is proved as follows. No one can definitely think a negation unless he founds it on the opposite affirmation. A man completely blind cannot frame the smallest conception of darkness, because he has none of light. All negations are therefore derivative; it is the realities which contain the material by which a complete determination of anything becomes possible. The source, from which all possible predicates may be derived, can be nothing but the sum total of reality. And this concept of the omnitudo realitatis is the Idea of a Being that is single and individual. As all finite beings derive the material of their possibility from it, they presuppose it, and cannot, therefore, constitute it. They are imperfect copies (ectypa), of which it is the sole Ideal. The Idea is also individual. Out of each possible pair of contradictory predicates, that one which expresses reality belongs to it. By these infinitely numerous positive predicates it is determined to absolute concreteness; and as it therefore possesses all that has reality, not only in nature but in man, it must be conceived as a personal and intelligent Primordial Being. The logical Ideal, thus determining itself completely by its own concept, appears not only as ideal but also as real, not only as logical but also as divine.

Kant so far anticipates his criticism of the ontological argument as to give, in the remaining paragraphs of this second section, a preliminary criticism of this procedure. For the purpose for which the Ideal is postulated, namely, the determination of all finite and therefore limited existences, Reason does not require to presuppose an existence corresponding to it. Its mere Idea will suffice.

“All manifoldness of things is only a correspondingly varied mode of limiting the concept of the highest reality which forms their common substratum, just as all figures are only possible as so many different modes of limiting infinite space.”[1604]

This relation is not, however, that of a real existence to other things but of an Idea to concepts. The Idea is a mere fiction, necessary for comprehending the limited, not a reality that can be asserted, even hypothetically,[1605] as given along with the limited. None the less, owing to a natural transcendental illusion, the mind inevitably tends to hypostatise it, and so generates the object of rational theology.

Comment.—The explanation of this illusion, which Kant proceeds to give in the two concluding paragraphs, is peculiarly confusing. Though the concept of an all-comprehensive reality may, he argues, be required for the definition of sensible objects, such a concept must not for that reason be taken as representing a real existence. The teaching of the section on Amphiboly is here entirely ignored; and the reader is bewildered by the assumption, which Kant apparently makes, that something analogous to the Leibnizian Ideal is a prerequisite of possible experience.

These last remarks indicate the kind of criticism to which the argument of this section lays itself open. In expounding the teaching of the Leibnizian science of rational theology, Kant strives to represent its Ideal as being an inevitable Idea of human Reason; and in order to make this argument at all convincing he is constrained to treat as valid the presupposed ontology, though that has already been shown in the discussion of Amphiboly to be altogether untenable.[1606] Limitation is not merely negative; genuine realities may negate one another. Though the objects of sense presuppose the entire system to which they belong, the form of this presupposition is in no respect analogous to that which Wolff would represent as holding between finite existences and the Ens realissimum. The passage in the Analytic[1607] in which Kant directly controverts the above teaching is as follows:

“The principle, that realities (as pure assertions) never logically contradict each other ... has not the least meaning either in regard to nature or in regard to any thing-in-itself.... Although Herr von Leibniz did not, indeed, announce this proposition with all the pomp of a new principle, he yet made use of it for new assertions, and his followers expressly incorporated it in their Leibnizian-Wolffian system. According to this principle all evils, for instance, are merely consequences of the limitations of created beings, i.e. negations, because negations alone conflict with reality.... Similarly his disciples consider it not only possible, but even natural, to combine all reality, without fear of any conflict, in one being, because the only conflict which they recognise is that of contradiction, whereby the concept of a thing is itself removed. They do not admit the conflict of reciprocal injury in which each of two real grounds destroys the effect of the other—a process which we can represent to ourselves only in terms of conditions presented to us in sensibility.”

Thus the Ideal which Kant here declares to be a necessary Idea of Reason is denounced in the Analytic as based on false principles peculiar to the Leibnizian philosophy, and as “without the least meaning in regard either to nature or to any thing in itself.” The teaching of the Analytic will no more combine with this scholastic rationalism than oil with water. The reader may safely absolve himself from the thankless task of attempting to render Kant’s argumentation in these paragraphs consistent with itself. Fortunately, in the next section, Kant returns to the standpoint proper to the doctrine he is expounding, and lays bare, with remarkable subtlety and in a very convincing manner, the concealed dialectic by which the conclusions of this metaphysical science are really determined.[1608]

SECTION III THE SPECULATIVE ARGUMENTS IN PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF A SUPREME BEING[1609]

Statement.—Though the Ideal is not arbitrary, but is presupposed in every attempt to define completely a finite concept, Reason would feel hesitation in thus transforming what is merely a logical concept into a Divine Existence, were it not that it is impelled from another direction to derive reality from such a source. All existences known in experience are contingent, and so lead us (owing to the constitution of our Reason) to assume an absolutely necessary Being as their ground and cause. Now when we examine our various concepts, to ascertain which will cover this notion of necessary existence, we find that there is one that possesses outstanding claims, namely, that Idea which contains a therefore for every wherefore, which is in no respect defective, and which does not permit us to postulate any condition. The concepts of the Ideal and of the necessary alone represent the unconditioned; and as they agree in this fundamental respect, they must, we therefore argue, be identical. And to this conclusion we are the more inclined, in that, by thus idealising reality, we are at the same time enabled to realise our Ideal.

This line of argument, which starts from the contingent, is as little valid as that which proceeds directly from the Ideal. But since these arguments express certain tendencies inherent in the human mind, they have a vitality which survives any merely forensic refutation. Though the conclusions to which they lead are false, they are none the less inevitably drawn. Our acceptance of them is due to a transcendental illusion which may be detected as such, but which, like the ingrained illusions of sense-experience, must none the less persist.

The opening paragraph of Section V[1610] is the natural completion of the above analysis. The ontological argument, in starting from the concept of the Ens realissimum, inverts the natural procedure. It is “a merely scholastic innovation,” and would never have been attempted save for the need of finding some necessary Being, to which we may ascend from contingent existence. It maintains that this necessary Being must be unconditioned and a priori certain, and accordingly looks for a concept capable of fulfilling this requirement. Such a concept is supposed to exist in the Idea of an Ens realissimum, and this Idea is therefore used to gain more definite knowledge of that which has been previously and independently recognised, namely, the necessary Being,

“This natural procedure of Reason was concealed from view, and instead of ending with this concept, the attempt was made to begin with it, and so to deduce from it that necessity of existence which it was only fitted to complete. Thus arose the unfortunate ontological proof, which yields satisfaction neither to the natural and healthy understanding nor to the more academic demands of strict proof.”[1611]

To return to Section III.: Kant breaks the continuity of his argument, and anticipates his discussion of the cosmological proof, by stopping to point out the illegitimacy of the assumption which underlies the first step in the above argument, namely, that a limited being cannot be absolutely necessary. Though the concept of a limited being does not contain the unconditioned, that does not prove that its existence is conditioned. Indeed each and every limited being may, for all their concepts show to the contrary, be unconditionally necessary.[1612] The above argument is consequently inconclusive, and cannot be relied on to give us any concept whatever of the qualities of a necessary Being. But this is a merely logical defect, and, as already noted, it is not really upon logical cogency that the persuasive force of the argument depends.

In conclusion Kant points out that there are only three possible kinds of speculative (i.e. theoretical) proofs of the existence of God: (1) from definite experience and the specific nature of the world of sense as revealed in experience; (2) from indefinite experience, i.e. from the fact that any existence at all is empirically given; (3) the non-empirical a priori proof from mere concepts. The first is the physico-theological or teleological argument, the second is the cosmological, and the third is the ontological. Kant finds it advisable to reverse the order of the proofs, and to begin by consideration of the ontological argument. This would seem to indicate that the ‘scholastic innovation’ to which he traces the origin of the ontological proof has more justification than his remarks appear to allow.

SECTION IV THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF AN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF[1613]

Statement.—Hitherto Kant has employed the concept of an absolutely necessary Being without question. He now recognises that the problem, from which we ought to start, is not whether the existence of an absolutely necessary Being can be demonstrated, but whether, and how, such a Being can even be conceived. And upon analysis he discovers that the assumed notion of an absolutely necessary, i.e. unconditioned Being is entirely lacking in intelligible content. For in eliminating all conditioning causes—through which alone the understanding can conceive necessity of existence—we also remove this particular kind of necessity. A verbal definition may, indeed, be given of the Idea, as when we say that it represents something the non-existence of which is impossible. But this yields no insight into the reasons which make its non-existence inconceivable, and such insight is required if anything at all is to be thought in the Idea.

“The expedient of removing all those conditions which the understanding indispensably requires in order to regard something as necessary, simply through the introduction of the word unconditioned, is very far from sufficing to show whether I am still thinking anything, or not rather perhaps nothing at all, in the concept of the unconditionally necessary.”[1614]

The untenableness of the concept has been in large part concealed through a confusion between logical and ontological necessity, that is, between necessity of judgment and necessity of existence. The fact that every proposition of geometry must be regarded as absolutely necessary was supposed to justify this identification. It was not observed that logical necessity refers only to judgments, not to things and their relations, and that the absolute necessity of the judgment holds only upon the assumption that the conditioned necessity of the thing referred to has previously been granted. If there be any such thing as a triangle, the assertion that it has three angles will follow with absolute necessity; but the existence of a triangle or even of space in general is contingent. In other words, the asserted necessity is only a form of logical sequence, not the unconditioned necessity of existence which is supposed to be disclosed in the Idea of Reason. All judgments, so far as they refer to existence, as distinct from mere possibility, are hypothetical, and serve to define a reality that is only contingently given. In adopting this position, Kant is in entire agreement with Hume. The contradictory of a matter of fact is always thinkable. There has, Kant claims, been no more fruitful source of illusion throughout the whole history of philosophy than the belief in an absolute necessity that is purely logical.[1615] In the ontological argument we have the most striking instance of such rationalistic exaggeration of the powers of thought.

Comment.—Had this criticism of the Idea of unconditioned necessity been introduced at an earlier stage in Kant’s argument, much confusion would have been avoided. It involves the thorough revisal of his criticism of the third and fourth antinomies, as well as of the whole account hitherto given of the function of Reason and of its metaphysical dialectic. The principle, that if the conditioned be given, the whole series of conditions up to the unconditioned is likewise given, must no longer be accepted as a basis for argument. Indeed the very terms in which Reason has so far been defined, as the faculty of the unconditioned, become subject to question. In that definition the term unconditioned has tacitly been taken as equivalent to the unconditionally necessary, and on elimination of the element of necessity, it will reduce merely to the concept of totality, which is a pure form of the understanding. Those parts of the Dialectic, which embody the view that Reason is simply the understanding transcendently employed, will thus be confirmed; the alternative view of Reason as a separate faculty will have to be eliminated. But these are questions which Kant himself proceeds to raise and discuss.[1616] Meantime he applies the above results in criticism of the ontological argument.

Statement.—In an identical judgment it is contradictory to reject the predicate while retaining the subject. But there is no contradiction if we reject subject and predicate alike, for nothing is then left that can be contradicted. If we assume that there is a triangle, we are bound to recognise that it has three angles, but there is no contradiction in rejecting the triangle together with its three angles. The same holds true of an absolutely necessary Being. ‘God is omnipotent’ is an identical and therefore necessary judgment. But if we say, ‘There is no God,’ neither the omnipotence nor any other attribute remains; and there is therefore not the least contradiction in saying that God does not exist. The only way of evading this conclusion is to argue that there are subjects which cannot be removed out of existence. That, however, would only be another way of asserting that there exist absolutely necessary subjects, and that is the very assertion which is now in question, and which the ontological argument undertakes to prove. Our sole test of what cannot be removed is the contradiction which would thereby result; and the only possible instance which can be cited is the concept of the Ens realissimum. It remains, therefore, to establish the above criticism for this specific case.

At the start Kant points out that absence of internal contradiction, even if granted, proves only that the Ens realissimum is a logically possible concept (as distinguished from the nihil negativum[1617]); it does not suffice to establish the possibility of the object of the concept. But for the sake of argument Kant allows this initial assumption to pass. The argument to be disproved is that as reality comprehends existence, existence is contained in the concept of Ens realissimum, and cannot therefore be denied of it without removing its internal possibility. The really fundamental assumption of this argument is that existence is capable of being included in the concept of a possible being. If that were so, the assertion of its existence would be an analytic proposition, and the proof could not be challenged. (The assumption is partly concealed by alternation of the terms reality and existence: in their actual employment they are completely synonymous.) As the above assumption thus decides the entire issue, Kant sets himself to establish, in direct opposition to it, the thesis, that every proposition which predicates existence is synthetic, and that in consequence its denial can never involve a logical contradiction. Existence can never form part of the content of a conception, and therefore must not be regarded as a possible predicate. What logically corresponds to it in a judgment is a purely formal factor, namely, the copula. The proposition, ‘God is omnipotent,’ contains two concepts, each of which has its object—God and omnipotence. The word ‘is’ adds no new predicate, but only serves to posit the predicate in its relation to the subject. Similarly, when we take the subject together with all its predicates (including that of omnipotence), and say, ‘God is’ or ‘there is a God,’ we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all its predicates as being an object that stands in relation to our concept. In order that the proposition be true, the content of the object and of the concept must be one and the same. If the object contained more than the concept, the concept would not express the object, and the proposition would assert a relation that does not hold. Or to state the same point in another way, the real must not contain more content than the possible. Otherwise it would not be the possible, but something different from the possible, which would then be taken as existing. A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers. Though my financial position is very differently affected by a hundred real thalers than by the thought of them only, a conceived hundred thalers are not in the least increased through acquiring existence outside my concept.

Kant presents his argument in still another form. If we think in a thing every kind of reality except one, the missing reality is not supplied by my saying that this defective thing exists. On the contrary, it exists with the same defect with which I have thought it. When, therefore, I think a Being as the highest reality, without any defect, the question still remains whether it exists or not. For though, in my concept, nothing may be lacking of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is still lacking in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, knowledge of its existence; and such knowledge can never be obtained save in an a posteriori manner. That is owing to the limitations imposed by the conditions of our sense-experience. We never confound the existence of a sensible object with its mere concept. The concept represents something that may or may not exist: to determine existence we must refer to actual experience. As Kant has already stated, the actual is always for us the accidental, and its assertion is therefore synthetic. A possible idea and the idea of a possible thing are quite distinct.[1618] A thing is known to be possible only when presented in some concrete experience, or when, though not actually experienced, it has been proved to be bound up, according to empirical laws, with given perceptions. It is not, therefore, surprising that if we try, as is done in the ontological argument, to think existence through the pure category, we cannot mention a single mark distinguishing it from a merely logical possibility. The concept of a Supreme Being is, in many respects, a valuable Idea, but just because it is an Idea of pure Reason, i.e. a mere Idea, we can no more extend our knowledge of real existence by means of it, than a merchant can better his position by adding a few noughts to his cash account.

There are many points of connection between this section and the first edition Introduction; and in view of these points of contact Adickes has suggested[1619] that the considerations which arose in the examination of the ontological argument may have been what brought Kant to realise that the various problems of the Critique can all be traced to the central problem of a priori synthesis.

SECTION V THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF A COSMOLOGICAL PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD[1620]

Statement.—Kant, as already noted, views the ontological proof as ‘a mere innovation of scholastic wisdom’ which restates, in a quite unnatural form, a line of thought much more adequately expressed in the cosmological proof. To discover the natural dialectic of Reason we must therefore look to this latter form of argument. It is composed of two distinct stages. In the first stage it makes no use of specific experience: if anything is given us as existing, e.g. the self, there must exist an absolutely necessary Being as its cause. Then, in the second stage, it is argued that as such a Being must be altogether outside experience, Reason must leave experience entirely aside, and discover from among pure concepts what properties an absolutely necessary Being ought to possess, i.e. which among all possible things contains in itself the conditions of absolute necessity. The requisite enlightenment is believed by Reason to be derivable only from the concept of an Ens realissimum, and Reason therefore at once concludes that this concept must represent the absolutely necessary Being.

Now in that final conclusion the truth of the ontological argument is assumed. If the concept of a Being of the highest reality is so completely adequate to the concept of necessary existence that they can be regarded as identical, the latter must be capable of being derived from the former, and that is all that is maintained in the ontological proof. To make this point clearer, Kant states it in scholastic form. If the proposition be true, that every absolutely necessary Being is at the same time the most real Being (and this is the nervus probandi of the cosmological proof in so far as it is also theological), it must, like all affirmative propositions, be capable of conversion, at least per accidens. This gives us the proposition that some Entia realissima are at the same time absolutely necessary Beings. One Ens realissimum, however, does not differ from another, and what applies to one applies to all. In this case, therefore, we must employ simple conversion, and say that every Ens realissimum is a necessary Being. Thus the cosmological proof is not only as illusory as the ontological, but also less honest. While pretending to lead us by a new road to a sound conclusion, it brings us back, after a short circuit, into the old path. If the ontological argument is correct, the cosmological is superfluous; and if the ontological is false, the cosmological cannot possibly be true.

But the first stage of the cosmological argument, that by which it is distinguished from the ontological, is itself fallacious. A whole nest of dialectical assumptions lies hidden in its apparently simple and legitimate inference from the contingent to the necessary. To advance from the contingent to the necessary, from the relative to the absolute, from the given to the transcendent, is just as illegitimate as the opposite process of passing from Idea to existence. The necessity of thought, which is in both cases the sole ground of the inference, is found on examination to be of merely subjective character. No less than three false assumptions are involved in this inference. In the first place, the principle that everything must have a cause, which can be proved to be valid only within the world of sense, is here applied to the sensible world as a whole; and is therefore employed in the wider form which coincides with the fundamental principle of the higher faculty of Reason. We assume, that if the conditioned be given, the totality of its conditions up to the unconditioned is given likewise. No such principle can be granted. As it is synthetic, it could be established only as a condition of the possibility of experience. But no such proof is offered: the principle is based upon a purely intellectual concept. Secondly, the inference to a first cause rests on the kindred assumption that an infinite series of empirical causes is impossible. That conclusion can never be drawn, even within the realm of experience. How, then, can we rely upon it in advancing beyond experience? Certainly, no one can prove that the empirical series is infinite, but just as little can we establish the opposite. In discussing the third and fourth antinomies Kant has shown that the existence of a first cause or of an absolutely necessary Being, though possible (or rather, possibly possible), is never demonstrable. Thirdly—as has been shown in A 592-3 = B 620-1—in inferring to an unconditioned cause, it is blindly assumed that the removal of all conditions does not at the same time remove the very concept of necessity. Our only notion of necessity is derived from experience, and therefore depends on those finite conditions which the argument would deny to us. The concept of unconditioned necessity is entirely null and void.

The fourth defect, which Kant enumerates, refers to the second stage of the cosmological argument, and has already been considered. He ought also to have mentioned a still further assumption underlying its first stage, namely, that a concept which represents a limited being, as, for instance, that of matter, cannot represent necessary existence. This also is an assumption which it cannot justify. This objection Kant has himself stated in A 586 = B 614 and A 588 = B 616.[1621]

Comment.—We are apt to overlook the wider sweep which Kant’s criticism takes in this section, owing to his omission to notify the reader that he is here calling in question a principle which he has hitherto been taking for granted, namely, the principle in terms of which he has in the opening sections of the Dialectic defined the faculty of Reason, that if the conditioned be given the totality of conditions up to the unconditioned is given likewise. The first step in his rejection of this principle occurs as merely incidental to his criticism of the ontological argument. It is there shown that the concept of the unconditionally necessary is without meaning. Now, in this present section, he calls in question the principle itself. It must be rejected not only, as stated in the third of the above objections, because the concept of the unconditioned, which tacitly implies the factor of absolute necessity, is without real significance, but also for two further reasons—those above cited in the first and second objections. How very differently the problems of the Dialectic appear, and how very differently the Ideas of Reason have to be regarded, when this principle, and also the concept of the unconditioned of which it is the application, are thus called in question, will be shown in the sequel.

DISCOVERY AND EXPLANATION OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL ILLUSION IN ALL TRANSCENDENTAL PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF A NECESSARY BEING[1622]

Statement.—We do not properly fulfil the task prescribed by Critical teaching in merely disproving the cosmological argument. We must also explain its hold upon the mind. If it is, as Kant insists, more natural to the mind than the ontological, and yet, as we have just seen, is more fallacious; if it has not been invented by philosophers, but is the instinctive reasoning of the natural man, it must rest, like all dialectical illusion, upon a misunderstanding of the legitimate demands of pure Reason. Reason demands the unconditioned, and yet cannot think it.

“Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human Reason the veritable abyss.... We can neither help thinking, nor can we bear the thought, that a Being—even if it be the one which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all Beings—should, as it were, say to itself: ‘I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is through my will; but whence am I?’ All support here fails us; and supreme perfection, no less than the least perfection, is unsubstantial and baseless for the merely speculative Reason....”[1623]

We are obliged to think something as necessary for all existence, and yet at the same time are unable to think anything as in itself necessary—God as little as anything else.

The explanation[1624] of this strange fact must be that which follows as a corollary from the limitation of our knowledge to sense-experience, namely, that our concepts of necessity and contingency do not concern things in themselves, and cannot therefore be applied to them in accordance with either of the two possible alternatives. Each alternative must express a subjective principle of Reason; and the two together (that something exists by necessity, and that everything is only contingent) must form complementary rules for the guidance of the understanding. These rules will then be purely heuristic and regulative, relating only to the formal interests of Reason, and may well stand side by side. For the one tells us that we ought to philosophise as if there were a necessary first ground for everything that exists, i.e. that we ought to be always dissatisfied with relativity and contingency, and to seek always for what is unconditionally necessary. The other warns us against regarding any single determination in things (such, for instance, as impenetrability or gravity) as absolutely necessary, and so bids us keep the way always open for further derivation. In other words, Reason guides the understanding by a twofold command. The understanding must derive phenomena and their existence from other phenomena, just as if there were no necessary Being at all; while at the same time it must always strive towards the completeness of that derivation, just as if such a necessary Being were presupposed. It is owing to a transcendental illusion or subreption that we view the latter principle as constitutive, and so think its unity as hypostatised in the form of an Ens realissimum. The falsity of this substitution becomes evident as soon as we consider that unconditioned necessity, as a thing in itself, cannot even be conceived, and that the “Idea” of it cannot, therefore, be ascribed to Reason save as a merely formal principle, regulative of the understanding in its interpretation of given experience.[1625]

Comment.—The reader may observe that, when Kant is developing this sceptical view of the Ideal of Reason, the explanation of dialectical illusion in terms of transcendental idealism falls into the background. The illusion is no longer traced to a confusion between appearances and things in themselves, but to the false interpretation of regulative principles as being constitutive. When it is the cosmological problem with which we are dealing, the two illusions do, indeed, coincide. If we view the objects of sense-experience as things in themselves, we are bound to regard the Ideal completion of the natural sciences as an adequate representation of ultimate reality. But in Rational Theology, which is professedly directed towards the definition of a Being distinct from nature and conditioning all finite existence, it is not failure to distinguish between appearance and things in themselves, but the mistaking of a merely formal Ideal for a representation of reality, that is alone responsible for the conclusions drawn.

In A 617-18 = B 645-6 Kant makes statements which conflict with the teaching of A 586 = B 614 and A 588 = B 616. In the latter passages he has argued that the concept of a limited being may not without specific proof be taken as contradictory of absolute necessity. He now categorically declares that the philosophers of antiquity are in error in regarding matter as primitive and necessary; and the reason which he gives is that the regulative principle of Reason forbids us to view extension and impenetrability, “which together constitute the concept of matter,” as ultimate principles of experience. But obviously Kant is here going further than his regulative principle will justify. It demands only that we should always look for still higher principles of unity, and so keep open the way for possible further derivation; it does not enable us to assert that such will actually be found to exist. Notwithstanding the Ideal demands of the regulative principle, matter may be primordial and necessary, and its properties of extension and impenetrability may not be derivable from anything more ultimate.

In this connection we may raise the more general question, how far the Ideal demand for necessity and unity in knowledge and existence can be concretely pictured. Kant gives a varying answer. Sometimes—when he is emphasising the limitation of our theoretical knowledge to sense-experience—he reduces the speculative Idea of Divine Existence to a purely abstract maxim for the regulation of natural science. When the Ideal occupies the mind on its own account, and so attracts our attention away from our sense-knowledge, it is an unreality, and perverts the understanding; it yields genuine light and leading only as a quite general maxim within the sphere of natural science. From this point of view necessary Being, even as an Ideal, can by no means be identified with a personal God. It signifies only the highest possible system and unity of the endlessly varied natural phenomena in space and time, and can be approximately realised in the most various ways. Its significance is entirely cosmological. It is an Ideal of positive science, and signifies only systematic unity in the object known. In being transformed from a scientific ideal into a subject of theological enquiry, it has inevitably given rise to dialectical illusion. At other times,—when he is concerned to defend the concept of Divine Existence as at least possible, and so to prepare the way for its postulation as implied in the moral law, or when he is seeking, as in the Critique of Judgment, to render comprehensible the complete adaptation of phenomenal nature in its material aspect to the needs of our understanding—Kant insists that we are ultimately compelled, by the nature of our faculties, to conceive the Ideal of Reason as a personal God, as an Intelligence working according to purposes. Only by such a personal God, he maintains, can the demands of Reason be genuinely satisfied.

These two interpretations of the Ideal of Reason are in conflict with one another; and so far as the Critique of Pure Reason is concerned, a very insufficient attempt is made to justify the frequent assertion that the Idea of God is the Ideal of Reason, and not merely one possible, and highly problematic, interpretation of it. If the Idea of God is a necessary Idea, it cannot be adequately expressed through any merely regulative maxim. It demands not only system in knowledge but also perfection in the nature of the known. It is not a merely logical Ideal such as might be satisfied by any rational system, but an Ideal which concerns matter as well as form, man as well as nature, our moral needs as well as our intellectual demands. If Kant is to maintain that the only genuine function of theoretical Reason is to guide the understanding in its scientific application, he is debarred from asserting that a concrete interpretation of its regulative principles is unavoidable. And he is also precluded by his own limitation of all knowledge to sense-experience from seeking to define by any positive predicate the transcendent nature of the thing in itself.

Such justification as Kant can offer in support of his assertion that the Idea of God, of Intelligent Perfection, is an indispensable Idea of human Reason, is chiefly based upon the teleological aspect of nature which is dealt with in the physico-theological proof. Mechanical science implies only the cosmological Idea: teleological unity presupposes the theological Ideal. Further enquiry, then, into the necessity of the Idea of God as a regulative principle, and its dangers as a source of dialectical illusion, we must defer until we have examined the one remaining argument.[1626]

SECTION VI THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE PHYSICO-THEOLOGICAL PROOF[1627]

Statement.—The teleological proof starts from our definite knowledge of the order and constitution of the sensible world. The actual world presents such immeasurable order, variety, fitness, and beauty, that we are led to believe that here at least is sufficient proof of the existence of God. Kant’s attitude towards this argument is at once extremely critical and extremely sympathetic. Though he represents it as the oldest, the clearest, and the most convincing, he is none the less prepared to show that it contains every one of the fallacies involved in the other two proofs, as well as some false assumptions peculiar to itself. It possesses overpowering persuasive force, not because of any inherent logical cogency, but because it so successfully appeals to feeling as to silence the intellect. It would, Kant declares, be not only comfortless, but utterly vain to attempt to diminish its influence.

”[The mind is] aroused from the indecision of all melancholy reflection, as from a dream, by one glance at the wonders of nature and the majesty of the universe....”[1628]

Meantime, however, we are concerned with its merely logical force. We have to decide whether, as theoretical proof, it can claim assent on its own merits, requiring no favour, and no help from any other quarter. On the basis of empirical facts the argument makes the following assertions. (1) There are everywhere in the world clear indications of adaptation to a definite end. (2) As this adaptation cannot be due to the working of blind, mechanical laws, and accordingly cannot be explained as originating in things themselves, it must have been imposed upon them from without; and there must therefore exist, apart from the sensible world, an intelligent Being who has arranged it according to ideas antecedently formed. (3) As there is unity in the reciprocal relations of the parts of the universe as portions of a single edifice, and as the universe is infinite in extent and inexhaustible in variety, its intelligent cause must be single, all-powerful, all-wise, i.e. God.

Now, even granting for the sake of argument the admissibility of these assertions, they enable us to infer only an intelligent author of the purposive form of nature, not of its matter, only an architect who is very much hampered by the inadaptability of the material in which he has to work, not a Creator to whose will everything is due. To prove the contingency of matter itself, we should have to establish the truth of the cosmological proof.

But the assumptions implied even in the demonstration that God exists as a formative power, are by no means beyond dispute. Why may not nature be regarded as giving form to itself by its blindly working forces? Can it really be proved that nature is a work of art that demands an artificer as certainly as does a house, or a ship, or a clock? Kant’s argument is at this point extremely brief, and I shall so far digress from the statement of it, which he here gives, as to supplement it from his other writings. Even so-called dead matter is not merely inert. By its inherent powers of gravity and chemical attraction it spontaneously gives rise to the most wonderful forms. When Clarke and Voltaire, in their first enthusiasm over Newton’s great discovery, asserted that the planetary system must have been divinely created, each planet being launched in the tangent of its orbit by the finger of God, just as a wheel must be fixed into its place by the hand of the mechanician, they under-estimated the organising power of blind inanimate nature. As Kant argued in his early treatise,[1629] the planetary system can quite well have arisen, and, as it would seem, actually has come into existence, through the action of blindly working laws. The mechanical principles which account for its present maintenance will also account for its origin and development. But it is when we turn to animate nature, which is the chief source from which arguments for design are derived, that the insufficiency of the teleological argument becomes most manifest. As Kant points out in the Critique of Judgment, the differentia distinguishing the living from the lifeless, is not so much that it is organised as that it is self-organising. When, therefore, we treat an organism as an analogon of art we completely misrepresent its essential nature.[1630] In regarding it as put together by an external agent we are ignoring its internal self-developing power. As Hume had previously maintained in his Dialogues on Natural Religion,[1631] the facts of the organic world not only agree with the facts of the inorganic world in not supporting the argument of the teleological proof, but are in direct conflict with it.

But to return to Kant’s immediate statement of the argument. Setting the above objection aside, and granting for the present that nature may be regarded as the outcome of an external artificer, we can argue only to a cause adequate to its production, i.e. to an extraordinarily wise and wonderfully powerful Being. Even if we ignore the existence of evil and defect in nature, the step from great power to omnipotence, and from great wisdom to omniscience, is one that can never be justified on empirical grounds.[1632] Since the Ideas of Reason, and above all the completely determined, individual Ideal of Reason, transcend experience, experience can never justify us in inferring their reality. The teleological argument can, indeed, only lead us to the point of admiring the greatness, wisdom, and power of the author of the world. In proceeding further it abandons experience altogether, and reasons, not from particular kinds and excellencies of natural design, but from the contingency of all such adaptation to the existence of a necessary Being, exactly in the manner of the cosmological argument. And it ends by assuming, in agreement with the ontological proof, that the only possible necessary Being is the Ideal of Reason. Thus after committing a number of fallacies on its own account, the teleological argument itself endorses all those that are involved in the more a priori proofs. The teleological argument rests on the cosmological, and the cosmological on the ontological, which therefore would be the only proof possible, were the proof of a completely transcendent proposition ever possible at all. The strange fact that the convincing force of the arguments thus varies inversely with their validity shows, Kant maintains, that we are correct in concluding that they do not really depend upon their logical cogency, and merely express, in abstract terms, beliefs deep-rooted in the human spirit.

SECTION VII CRITICISM OF ALL THEOLOGY BASED ON SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES OF REASON[1633]

A 631-3 = B 659-66.—On the distinction between “theist” and “deist,” cf. Encyclopædia Britannica, vii. p. 934:

“The later distinction between ‘theist’ and ‘deist,’ which stamped the latter word as excluding the belief in providence or in the immanence of God, was apparently formulated in the end of the eighteenth century by those rationalists who were aggrieved at being identified with the naturalists.”

A 633-4 = B 661-2.—Kant here does no more than indicate that by way of practical Reason it may be possible to postulate, though not theoretically to comprehend, a Supreme Being. On the distinction between postulates and hypotheses, cf. A 769 ff. = B 797 ff., and below, p. 543 ff. Cf. also p. 571 ff.

A 634 = B 662.—On relative necessity, cf. below, pp. 555, 571 ff.

A 635-9 = B 663-7 only summarises points already treated.

A 639-42 = B 667-70.—Kant concludes by declaring that the Ideal, in addition to its regulative function, possesses two further prerogatives. In the first place, it supplies a standard, in the light of which any knowledge of Divine Existence, acquired from other sources, can be purified and rendered consistent with itself. For it is “an Ideal without a flaw,” the true crown and culmination of the whole of human knowledge.

“If there should be a moral theology ... transcendental theology ... will then prove itself indispensable in determining its concept and in constantly testing Reason which is so often deceived by sensibility, and which is frequently out of harmony with its own Ideas.”[1634]

And secondly, though the Ideal fails to establish itself theoretically, the arguments given in its support suffice to show the quite insufficient foundations upon which all atheistic, deistic, and anthropomorphic philosophies rest.

Comment.—These concluding remarks cannot be accepted as representing Kant’s true teaching. The Ideal, by his own showing, is by no means without a flaw. In so far as it involves the concept of unconditioned necessity, it is meaningless; it is purely logical, and therefore contains no indication of real content; it embodies a false view of the nature of negation, and therefore of the relation of realities to one another. In short, it is constituted in accordance with the false, un-Critical principles of Leibnizian metaphysics, and is found on examination to be non-existent even as a purely mental entity. Reduced to its proper terms, it becomes a mere schema regulative of the understanding in the extension of experience, and does not yield even a negative criterion for the testing of our ideals of Divine Existence. The criterion, which Kant really so employs, is not that of an Ens realissimum, but the concept of an Intuitive Understanding, which, as he has indicated in the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena,[1635] is our most adequate Ideal of completed Perfection. This latter is not itself, however, a spontaneously formed concept of natural Reason, and does not justify the assertion that the Idea of God is a necessary Idea of the human mind. In attempting to defend such a thesis, Kant is unduly influenced by the almost universal acceptance of deistic beliefs in the Europe of his time.[1636] His criticism of the Ideal of Reason and of rational theology is much more destructive, and really allows that theology much less value, even as natural dialectic, than he is willing to admit.[1637] Architectonic forbids that the extreme radical consequences of the teaching of the Analytic should be allowed to show in their full force. These shortcomings are, however, in great part remedied in the elaborate Appendix which Kant has attached to the Dialectic.