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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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We must show, moreover, the misconceptions and illusions that intrude into syllogisms, the major proposition of which pure reason has supplied--a proposition which has perhaps more of the character of a petitio than of a postulatum--and that proceed from experience upwards to its conditions. I cannot agree with the opinion of several admirable thinkers--Sulzer among the rest--that, in spite of the weakness of the arguments hitherto in use, we may hope, one day, to see sufficient demonstrations of the two cardinal propositions of pure reason--the existence of a Supreme Being, and the immortality of the soul. Thus the physico-theological is based upon the cosmological, and this upon the ontological proof of the existence of a Supreme Being; and as besides these three there is no other path open to speculative reason, the ontological proof, on the ground of pure conceptions of reason, is the only possible one, if any proof of a proposition so far transcending the empirical exercise of the understanding is possible at all. In this case it must--pure reason as it is--exhibit an empirical character. In what propositions is pure reason unavoidably subject to an antinomy? Reason must not, therefore, in its transcendental endeavours, look forward with such confidence, as if the path it is pursuing led straight to its aim, nor reckon with such security upon its premisses, as to consider it unnecessary to take a step back, or to keep a strict watch for errors, which, overlooked in the principles, may be detected in the arguments themselves--in which case it may be requisite either to determine these principles with greater strictness, or to change them entirely. therefore, are not conclusions of our reason. Now the transcendental (subjective) reality at least of the pure conceptions of reason rests upon the fact that we are led to such ideas by a necessary procedure of reason. Reason is the discovery of truth or falshood.