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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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Permanence is, in fact, just another expression for time, as the abiding correlate of all existence of phenomena, and of all change, and of all coexistence. But if we believe that everything in the world--be it condition or conditioned--is contingent; every given existence is too small for our conception. We never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the non-existence of space, though we may easily enough think that no objects are found in it. For otherwise succession, which is always found in perceptions as apprehensions, would be predicated of external objects, and their representation of their coexistence be thus impossible. It does not begin from conceptions, but from common experience, and requires a basis in actual existence. The case is very different with those principles whose province it is to subject the existence of phenomena to rules a priorI. For as existence does not admit of being constructed, it is clear that they must only concern the relations of existence and be merely regulative principles. Problematical idealism, which makes no such assertion, but only alleges our incapacity to prove the existence of anything besides ourselves by means of immediate experience, is a theory rational and evidencing a thorough and philosophical mode of thinking, for it observes the rule not to form a decisive judgement before sufficient proof be shown. That is to say, if the state, b, differs from the state, a, only in respect to quantity, the change is a coming into existence of b - a, which in the former state did not exist, and in relation to which that state is = O. If, now, we take the above propositions--as they must be accepted as valid for all thinking beings in the system of rational psychology--in synthetical connection, and proceed, from the category of relation, with the proposition; "All thinking beings are, as such, substances," backwards through the series, till the circle is completed; we come at last to their existence, of which, in this system of rational psychology, substances are held to be conscious, independently of external things; nay, it is asserted that, in relation to the permanence which is a necessary characteristic of substance, they can of themselves determine external things.