sense-world, and, in the inference from the impossibility of an infinite series of conditions to a first cause, it employs the subjective principle of investigation—­to assume hypothetically a necessary ultimate ground in behalf of the systematic unity of knowledge—­as an objective principle applying to things in themselves.  The ontological argument, finally, which the two nominally empirical arguments hoped to avoid, but in which in the end they were forced to take refuge, goes to wreck on the impossibility of dragging out of an idea the existence of the object corresponding to it.  Existence denotes nothing further than the position of the subject with all the marks which are thought in its concept—­that is, its relation to our knowledge, but does not itself belong to the predicates of the concept, and hence cannot be analytically derived from the latter.  The content of the concept is not enriched by the addition of being; a hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred conceived dollars.  All existential propositions are synthetic; hence the existence of God cannot be demonstrated from the concept of God.  It is a contradiction, to be sure, to say that God is not almighty, just as it is a contradiction to deny that a triangle has three angles:  if posit the concept I must not remove the predicate which necessarily belongs to it.  If I remove the subject, however, together with its predicate (the almighty God is not), no contradiction arises, for in that case nothing remains to be contradicted.

Thus all the proofs for the existence of a necessary being are shown to be illusory, and the basis of speculative theology uncertain.  Nevertheless the idea of God retains its validity, and the perception of the inability of reason to demonstrate its objective reality on theoretical grounds has great value.  For though the existence of God cannot be proved, it is true, by way of recompense, that it cannot be disproved; the same grounds which show us that the assertion of his existence is based on a weak foundation suffice also to prove every contrary assertion unfounded.  And should practical motives present themselves to turn the scale in favor of the assumption of a supreme and all-sufficient Being, reason would be obliged to take sides and to follow these grounds, which, it is true, are not objectively sufficient,[1] but still preponderant, and than which we know none better.  After, however, the objective reality of the idea of God is guaranteed from the standpoint of ethics, there remains for transcendental theology the important negative duty ("censorship,” Censor) of exactly determining the concept of the most perfect Being (as a being which through understanding and freedom contains the first ground of all other things), of removing from it all impure elements, and of putting an end to all opposite assertions, whether atheistic, deistic (deism maintains the possibility of knowing the existence of an original being, but declares all