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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 transcendental cognition, so long as we are dealing only with conceptions of the understanding, we are guided by possible experience. For all synthetical principles of the understanding are valid only as immanent in experience; while the cognition of a Supreme Being necessitates their being employed transcendentally, and of this the understanding is quite incapable. It does not begin from conceptions, but from common experience, and requires a basis in actual existence. The so-called a priori principles of these faculties he consequently held to be invalid and imaginary, and regarded them as nothing but subjective habits of thought originating in experience, and therefore purely empirical and contingent rules, to which we attribute a spurious necessity and universality. For the principle of the former enounces, not that things themselves or substances, but only that which happens or their states--as empirically contingent, have a cause; the assertion that the existence of substance itself is contingent is not justified by experience, it is the assertion of a reason employing its principles in a speculative manner. As regard the manner in which I pass beyond my conception by the aid of experience, no doubts can be entertained. Nay, more, the conception of a cause likewise that of the contingent--loses, in this speculative mode of employing it, all significance, for its objective reality and meaning are comprehensible from experience alone.