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380 KANT. conditions to a first cause, it employs the subjective prin- ciple of investigation — to assume hypothetically a necessary ultimate ground in behalf of the systematic unity of knowl- edge — as an objective principle applying to things in them- selves. The ontological argument, finally, which the two nominally empirical arguments hopedto 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 analyt- ically 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 con- ceived 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 con- cept 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 contradic- tion arises, for in that case nothing remains to be con- tradicted. 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 ; 1 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 suffi-