PROLEGOMENA TOANYFUTUREMETAPHYSICS 835
We must therefore think an immaterial being, a world of understanding, and a
Supreme Being (all mere noumena), because in them only, as things in themselves,
reason finds that completion and satisfaction which it can never hope for in the deriva-
tion of appearances from their homogeneous grounds, and because these actually have
reference to something distinct from them (and totally heterogeneous), as appearances
always presuppose an object in itself and therefore suggest its existence whether we can
know more of it or not.
But as we can never know these beings of understanding as they are in themselves,
that is, as definite, yet must assume them as regards the sensible world and connect them
with it by reason, we are at least able to think this connection by means of such concepts
as express their relation to the world of sense. If we represent to ourselves a being of the
understanding by nothing but pure concepts of the understanding, we then indeed repre-
sent nothing definite to ourselves, and consequently our concept has no significance; but
if we think of it by properties borrowed from the sensuous world, it is no longer a being
of understanding, but is conceived phenomenally and belongs to the sensible world. Let
us take an instance from the notion of the Supreme Being.
The deistic conception is a quite pure concept of reason, but represents only a
thing containing all reality, without being able to determine any one reality [in it];
because for that purpose an example must be taken from the world of sense, in which
case I should have an object of sense only, not something quite heterogeneous which
can never be an object of sense. Suppose I attribute to the Supreme Being understand-
ing, for instance; I have no concept of an understanding other than my own, one that
must receive its intuitions by the senses and which is occupied in bringing them under
rules of the unity of consciousness. Then the elements of my concept would always lie
in the appearance; I should, however, by the insufficiency of the appearance have to go
beyond them to the concept of a being which neither depends upon appearances nor is
bound up with them as conditions of its determination. But if I separate understanding
from sensibility to obtain a pure understanding, then nothing remains but the mere form
of thinking without intuition, by which form alone I can know nothing definite and
consequently no object. For that purpose I should finally have to conceive another
understanding, such as would intuit its objects but of which I have not the least concept,
because the human understanding is discursive and can know only by means of general
concepts. And the very same difficulties arise if we attribute a will to the Supreme
Being, for I have this concept only by drawing it from my inner experience, and there-
fore from my dependence for satisfaction upon objects whose existence I require; and
so the concept rests upon sensibility, which is absolutely incompatible with the pure
concept of the Supreme Being.
Hume’s objections to deism are weak, and affect only the proofs and not the deistic
assertion itself. But as regards theism, which depends on a stricter determination of the
concept of the Supreme Being, which in deism is merely transcendent, they are very
strong and, as this concept is formed, in certain (in fact in all common) cases irrefutable.
Hume always insists that by the mere concept of an original being to which we apply only
ontological predicates (eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence) we think nothing definite,
and that properties which could yield a concept in concretowould have to be superadded.
He further insists that it is not enough to say it is cause, but we must explain the nature of
its causality, for example, that it is that of an understanding and of a will. He then begins
his attacks on the essential point itself, that is, theism, as he had previously directed his
battery only against the proofs of deism, an attack which is not very dangerous to it in its
consequences. All his dangerous arguments refer to anthropomorphism, which he holds to
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