no
respect defective; in other words, rational theology joins the rational
ideal of the most perfect Being with the fourth cosmological Idea of the
absolutely necessary Being.

The proof of the existence of God may be attempted in three ways: we may
argue the existence of a supreme cause either by starting from a definite
experience (the special constitution and order of the sense-world, that
is, its purposiveness), or from an indefinite experience (any existence
whatever), or, finally, abstracting from all experience, from mere concepts
_a priori_. But neither the empirical nor the transcendent nor the
intermediate line of thought leads to the goal. The most impressive and
popular of the proofs is the _physico-theological_ argument. But even if we
gratuitously admit the analogy of natural products with the works of human
art (for the argument is not able to prove that the purposive arrangement
of the things in the world, which we observe with admiration, is
contingent, and could only have been produced by an ordering, rational
principle, not self-produced by their own nature according to general
mechanical laws), this can yield an inference only to an intelligent author
of the purposive form of the world, and not to an author of its matter,
only, therefore, to a world-architect, not to a world-creator. Further,
since the cause must be proportionate to the effect, this argument can
prove only a very wise and wonderfully powerful, but not an omniscient
and omnipotent, designer, and so cannot give any definite concept of
the supreme cause of the world. In leaping from the contingency of the
purposive order of the world to the existence of something absolutely
necessary and thence to an all-comprehensive reality, the teleological
argument abandons the ground of experience and passes over into the
_cosmological argument_, which in its turn is merely a concealed
ontological argument (these two differ only in the fact that the
cosmological proof argues from the antecedently given absolute necessity
of a being to its unlimited reality, and the ontological, conversely, from
supreme reality to necessary existence). The weaknesses of the cosmological
argument in its first half consist in the fact that, in the inference
from the contingent to a cause for it, it oversteps the boundary of the
sense-world, and, in the inference from the impossibility of an infinite
series of conditions to a first cause, it employs the subjective princ