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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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To which we may add, what experience shews us, that the object was susceptible of such a number of changes betwixt these appearances; as also that the unchangeable or rather fictitious duration has the same effect upon every quality, by encreasing or diminishing it, as that succession, which is obvious to the senses. On the other hand, those who maintain the absolute reality of time and space, whether as essentially subsisting, or only inhering, as modifications, in things, must find themselves at utter variance with the principles of experience itself. He ought, moreover, clearly to recognize beforehand the unavoidable difficulties in his undertaking, so that he may not afterwards complain of the obscurity in which the subject itself is deeply involved, or become too soon impatient of the obstacles in his path; because we have a choice of only two things--either at once to give up all pretensions to knowledge beyond the limits of possible experience, or to bring this critical investigation to completion. A conception which contains a synthesis must be regarded as empty and, without reference to an object, if its synthesis does not belong to experience--either as borrowed from it, and in this case it is called an empirical conception, or such as is the ground and a priori condition of experience (its form), and in this case it is a pure conception, a conception which nevertheless belongs to experience, inasmuch as its object can be found in this alone. Finally, therefore, the categories are only capable of empirical use, inasmuch as they serve merely to subject phenomena to the universal rules of synthesis, by means of an a priori necessary unity (on account of the necessary union of all consciousness in one original apperception); and so to render them susceptible of a complete connection in one experience. The foregoing deduction is an exposition of the pure conceptions of the understanding (and with them of all theoretical a priori cognition), as principles of the possibility of experience, but of experience as the determination of all phenomena in space and time in general--of experience, finally, from the principle of the original synthetical unity of apperception, as the form of the understanding in relation to time and space as original forms of sensibility. This only, to demonstrate the possibility of experience as a cognition in which at last all objects must be capable of being presented to us, if the representation of them is to possess any objective reality.