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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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In like manner, where there is one object, which we cannot feel after another without an interval, and the perceiving of that sensation we call motion in our hand or organ of sensation; experience shews us, that it is possible the same object may be felt with the same sensation of motion, along with the interposed impression of solid and tangible objects, attending the sensation.

 I cogitate merely the relation of a perfectly unknown being to the greatest possible systematic unity of experience, solely for the purpose of employing it as the schema of the regulative principle which directs reason in its empirical exercise. But, after we have thus denied the power of speculative reason to make any progress in the sphere of the supersensible, it still remains for our consideration whether data do not exist in practical cognition which may enable us to determine the transcendent conception of the unconditioned, to rise beyond the limits of all possible experience from a practical point of view, and thus to satisfy the great ends of metaphysics. 1. That which agrees with the formal conditions (intuition and conception) of experience, is possible. Hence it follows that the criterion of necessity is to be found only in the law of possible experience--that everything which happens is determined a priori in the phenomenon by its cause. But if the rationalist is bold enough to construct, on the mere authority of the faculty of thought--without any intuition, whereby an object is given--a self-subsistent being, merely because the unity of apperception in thought cannot allow him to believe it a composite being, instead of declaring, as he ought to do, that he is unable to explain the possibility of a thinking nature; what ought to hinder the materialist, with as complete an independence of experience, to employ the principle of the rationalist in a directly opposite manner-- still preserving the formal unity required by his opponent?] The minor contains an experience, the major reasons from a general experience to the existence of a necessary being.* Thus this argument really begins at experience, and is not completely a priori, or ontological. But to aim at realizing the ideal in an example in the world of experience--to describe, for instance, the character of the perfectly wise man in a romance--is impracticable. But this rule of the determination of a thing according to succession in time is as follows; "In what precedes may be found the condition, under which an event always (that is, necessarily) follows." From all this it is obvious that the principle of cause and effect is the principle of possible experience, that is, of objective cognition of phenomena, in regard to their relations in the succession of time. For of the possibility of a cause which changes the condition of things, that is, which determines them to the contrary to a certain given state, the understanding gives us a priori no knowledge; not merely because it has no insight into the possibility of it (for such insight is absent in several a priori cognitions), but because the notion of change concerns only certain determinations of phenomena, which experience alone can acquaint us with, while their cause lies in the unchangeable.