Proof. But it is not the need of thus going further, upon which Kant grounds his objection to this proof. On the contrary, his argument is conducted from points of view which lie wholly within the sphere of this proof, and which do not touch it.
But the objection referred to is not the only one which Kant brings forward against the line of argument followed by the Cosmological Proof. He goes on (p. 637) to expose the “further assumptions,” a “whole nest” of which, he declares, is concealed in it.
It contains, above all, the transcendental principle according to which we reason from what is contingent to a cause. This principle, however, applies in the world of sense only, and has no meaning whatever outside of it. For the purely intellectual conception of the contingent cannot possibly produce a synthetic proposition such as that of causality, a proposition which has a meaning and a use merely in the world of sense, but which is supposed to help us to get beyond the world of sense. What is maintained here, on the one hand, is the well-known doctrine, which is Kant’s main doctrine, of the inadmissibility of getting beyond sense by means of thought, and of the limitation of the use and meaning of the categories of thought to the world of sense. The elucidation of this doctrine does not come within the scope of our present treatment of the subject. What has to be said on this point may be summed up in the following question: If thought cannot pass beyond the world of sense, would it not be necessary, on the other hand, to show first of all how it is conceivable that thought can enter into the world of sense? The other assertion is that the intellectual conception of the contingent cannot form the basis of a synthetic proposition such as that of causality. As a matter of fact, it is by means of this intellectual category of contingency that the temporal world as present to perception is conceived of; and by employing this very category which is an
