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volved in experience likewise. Thus, in either case, the conception
of such a reality is not merely logical, but follows from a
rational analysis of any experience at all. Hence the objection
is invalid.
But to consider Kant's main objection: Kant maintains that
the reduction of the cosmological argument to the ontological
follows, as Kemp Smith says, from the fact that "if the concept
of a Being of the highest reality is so completely adequate to
the concept of necessary existence that they can be regarded as
identical, the latter must be capable of being derived from the
former." (Footnote 31: Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, p. 532.) But is this really the
case and does this really constitute a reduction of one argument
to the other? The ontological argument passes from the mere
idea that the concept of a most real being implies necessity of
existence, to the assertion of the objective and actual existence
of the Being. But the cosmological argument does not do this:
it first establishes the existence of an absolutely necessary being
on existential premises (for [[277]] example, that I exist). And
only then does it explain the conclusion of absolutely necessary
existence: this existence is precisely the ultimate reality to
which all other reals stand in a relation of contingency; the absolutely
necessary being means the basic reality or most real
being. If it be objected that the argument assumes that the two
concepts are convertible, this is readily admitted, but it is denied
that I have concluded the existence of God from either of
these concepts or from their conceptual identity: rather, I have
established His existence in an empirical fashion by a consistent
application of the rational categories to experience. It is to be
granted that from either of the two concepts in question, the
other may be inferred, but the objective existence of God is inferred,
not from such an interchange of concepts, but from the
necessity of positing His objective existence in terms of these
concepts in order to account for a world that is not self-existent.