Note 230 — Chapter V · SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS AND RELIGION

This was also a favourite argument with Leibnitz, as Kant notes. For an acute examination of Leibnitz’s use of it and the other “proofs,” see B. Russell’s Philosophy of Leibniz chap. 15. For Hume’s objections to it, see the already quoted part 9 of the Dialogue concerning Natural Religion. The other “proof” of the Third Meditation, namely, that my possession of an idea of God, which I could not have derived from empirical sources, proves the reality of the idea’s object, is only a special form of the ontological argument from idea to existence.