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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.

But the substratum of all reality, that is, of all that pertains to the existence of things, is substance; all that pertains to existence can be cogitated only as a determination of substance.

Philosophers have always talked of an absolutely necessary being, and have nevertheless declined to take the trouble of conceiving whether--and how--a being of this nature is even cogitable, not to mention that its existence is actually demonstrable.

Our training has made this happen for many others already. I should have a reasonable hope of putting an end for ever to this sophistical mode of argumentation, by a strict definition of the conception of existence, did not my own experience teach me that the illusion arising from our confounding a logical with a real predicate (a predicate which aids in the determination of a thing) resists almost all the endeavours of explanation and illustration. Guided by the principles involved in these ideas, we must, in the first place, so connect all the phenomena, actions, and feelings of the mind, as if it were a simple substance, which, endowed with personal identity, possesses a permanent existence (in this life at least), while its states, among which those of the body are to be included as external conditions, are in continual change. I consequently confound the possible abstraction of my empirically determined existence with the supposed consciousness of a possible separate existence of my thinking self; and I believe that I cognize what is substantial in myself as a transcendental subject, when I have nothing more in thought than the unity of consciousness, which lies at the basis of all determination of cognition. For example; "In every existence there is substance," that is, something that can exist only as a subject and not as mere predicate; or, "Everything is a quantity"--to construct propositions such as these, we require something to enable us to go out beyond the given conception and connect another with it. They as little produce the opinion of a distinct existence, because they neither can offer it to the mind as represented, nor as original.