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Click on the phrases to see them in context. The original texts by Immanuel Kant and David Hume are available from the Gutenberg Projet.
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The objects of experience then are not things in themselves, but are given only in experience, and have no existence apart from and independently of experience. It is self-evident that reason, in cogitating the necessary complete determination of things, does not presuppose the existence of a being corresponding to its ideal, but merely the idea of the ideal- for the purpose of deducing from the unconditional totality of complete determination, The ideal is therefore the prototype of all things, which, as defective copies (ectypa), receive from it the material of their possibility, and approximate to it more or less, though it is impossible that they can ever attain to its perfection. The process of understanding by which it represents to itself the sphere of a divided conception, is employed also when we think of a thing as divisible; and in the same manner as the members of the division in the former exclude one another, and yet are connected in one sphere, so the understanding represents to itself the parts of the latter, as having--each of them--an existence (as substances), independently of the others, and yet as united in one whole. are existent, and if you deny the existence of the latter, that of the former falls of course. - For example, I cogitate the existence of a being corresponding to a pure transcendental idea.
As the relation of cause and effect is requisite to persuade us of any real existence, so is this persuasion requisite to give force to these other relations. In this being it recognizes the characteristics of unconditioned existence. The aim of the cosmological argument is to avoid the necessity of proving the existence of a necessary being priori from mere conceptions--a proof which must be ontological, and of which we feel ourselves quite incapable.