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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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Thus I should find myself in the same position in rational psychology which I formerly occupied, that is to say, I should find myself still in need of sensuous intuitions, in order to give significance to my conceptions of substance and cause, by means of which alone I can possess a knowledge of myself; but these intuitions can never raise me above the sphere of experience. This principle of reason is hence valid only as a rule for the extension of a possible experience--its invalidity as a principle constitutive of phenomena in themselves having been sufficiently demonstrated. In the application of them, however, and in the advancing enlargement of the employment of reason, while struggling to rise from the region of experience and to soar to those sublime ideas, philosophy discovers a value and a dignity, which, if it could but make good its assertions, would raise it far above all other departments of human knowledge--professing, as it does, to present a sure foundation for our highest hopes and the ultimate aims of all the exertions of reason. But reason cannot cogitate this systematic unity, without at the same time cogitating an object of the idea--an object that cannot be presented in any experience, which contains no concrete example of a complete systematic unity. Whatever may be the original source of a cognition, it is, in relation to the person who possesses it, merely historical, if he knows only what has been given him from another quarter, whether that knowledge was communicated by direct experience or by instruction.