=The Idea of God.= The Idea of the soul involves us in a paralogism, the Idea of the universe as a whole involves us in inextricable difficulties and contradictions; the Idea of God cannot be demonstrated. Kant does not deny that God exists. He merely maintains that we cannot make God an object of knowledge. The Idea of God is to Kant the expression of the need of the Reason for a perfect unity. In one of his earlier writings Kant had constructed a conception of God, which is the same as appears in the _Critique_. God, purely as a conception, is constructed by Kant as the sum total of reality, the _ens realissimum_, who so includes all finite qualities in Himself that they do not limit Him. He is the primal cause of the possibility of all being. Now, can such an Idea have objective validity? No; the Idea of a sum total of all that is conceivable is not an object of possible experience. Only particular things or phenomena are realities for us. God as the transcending total of particular things can have only a conceptual reality and a validity for thought. The total has the reality that any idea has. This is Kant’s general criticism of the dialectic Idea of God. But the general conception of God had played so important a part in traditional philosophy that Kant felt it necessary to examine the three important intellectual proofs for His existence in order to show their falsity. He takes up first _the ontological proof_ of God’s existence, which originated with St. Anselm and had been accepted by the Rationalists. The Idea of God is the idea of a perfect being. A being would not be perfect who did not exist. Therefore the Idea of a perfect being must include the quality “existence” among its predicates. The essence of God must involve His existence, because the unreality of the _ens realissimum_ cannot be thought. Kant replies thus: “Being is no real predicate.” It is not a quality like love, power, or goodness, for it adds nothing to the content of the subject. “A hundred dollars contains no more content than a hundred possible or conceptual dollars.” We cannot reason from the concept of the actual to its existence. The only test of actuality is perception. _The cosmological proof_, which Kant examines next, is an argument from the existence of contingent phenomena to the existence of an unconditioned reality. There must be some uncaused cause of existing caused phenomena. Kant’s reply is this: Cause has no meaning if it is applied beyond the bounds of experience. Within experience all causes are the results of causes, and therefore an uncaused cause is a contradiction in terms. Every existing thing is contingent. A necessary being can be only a thought, and would not be powerful. It would not be as powerful as a very great finite being which had existence.