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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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But empirical cognition is experience; consequently no a priori cognition is possible for us, except of objects of possible experience.* Consequently they will not possess that immediate evidence which is peculiar to the former, although their application to experience does not, for that reason, lose its truth and certitude. The very essence of an idea consists in the fact that no experience can ever be discovered congruent or adequate with it. It is only by experience we learn their influence and connexion; and this influence we ought never to extend beyond experience. To attempt an empirical deduction of either of these classes would be labour in vain, because the distinguishing characteristic of their nature consists in this, that they apply to their objects, without having borrowed anything from experience towards the representation of them. Reason presupposes the existence of cognitions of the understanding, which have a direct relation to experience, and aims at the ideal unity of these cognitions--a unity which far transcends all experience or empirical notions. But if we do not find this unity in the nature of the things which go to constitute the world of experience, that is, of objective cognition, consequently in the universal and necessary laws of nature, how can we infer from this unity the idea of the supreme and absolutely necessary perfection of a primal being, which is the origin of all causality? In experience alone are those objects, which are nothing but representations, given. But experience teaches me that, how far soever I go, I always see before me a space in which I can proceed farther; and thus I know the limits--merely visual--of my actual knowledge of the earth, although I am ignorant of the limits of the earth itself.