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WHICH INITIATION DOES NOT LEAD ÁSTRAY FROM THE IRUE MYSTERIES
to possibility or essence entails "that nothing can be conceived as possible
unless whatever is real in every possible concept exists and indeed exists
absolutely necessary.”*!
3. One-ness. The absolutely necessary Being is predicated of omnitudo
realitatis which itself is identified as “an Infinite Being” [ein unendliches
Seiendes].” It contains in itself “whatever is real in every possible concept [was
in jedem möglichen Begriff real ist]” or “so to speak, [contains] the material of
all possible concepts.” Based on the fact of its absolutely necessary existence,
“it must be concluded that only one such Being exists absolutely necessarily.”°*
Following the principle of determining grounds /Realgrund], “one must
conclude that this omnitudo realitatis exists in God as its Realgrund.””
Kant’s fundamental question “How it comes about that there is, in general,
something which can be thought” is answered in a manner to which Schelling
would also subscribe: “how that should come about is something which
cannot be conceived at all, unless it is the case that whatever is real in the
concepts exists in God, the source of all reality.”°°
4. Spiritualness. In another work of the pre-critical Kant, his Only Possible
Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God’s Existence (1763), his argument
from 1755 is presented more extensively. In this work, one finds an argument
for the following proposition: “The necessary Being is a mind /Geist}.”°’
If the later Schelling had checked Kant’s pre-critical works—written
antecedent to when, as he says, “Kant was pulling himself entirely back within
the limits of the negative of just the logical”**—he would have been surprised
to discover in a concise way what he himself was propounding in his later
works on positive philosophy. It is definitely the effect of his Copernican
revolution toward a science of reason in the shape of a transcendental
idealism that the early Kant’s “positive” thinking on existence turned into
a—for Schelling “negative”’—transcendental logic of the pure understandings
categories of modality and their corresponding principles.
B. The Critical Kant on “Reason also has its Mysteries”
An intriguing case in the history of philosophical investigations on mysteries
is Kant’s critical discussion of this theme in his Religion within the Boundaries
of mere Reason (1793) in connection with his On the Miscarriage of all
51 Nova Dilucidatio, Prop. VU, Ak 1, 395.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Nova Dilucidatio, Prop. VU, Ak 1, 395-396.
57 Only Possible Argument in Support, Ak 2, 87.
°8 Grounding, Lecture V (SW 11/3) 84.
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