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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 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. Thus the reality of the external sense is necessarily connected with that of the internal, in order to the possibility of experience in general; that is, I am just as certainly conscious that there are things external to me related to my sense as I am that I myself exist as determined in time. On the other hand, no synthetical principle which is based upon conceptions, can ever be immediately certain (for example, the proposition; Everything that happens has a cause), because I require a mediating term to connect the two conceptions of event and cause- namely, the condition of time-determination in an experience, and I cannot cognize any such principle immediately and from conceptions alone. The postulate of the possibility of things requires also, that the conception of the things agree with the formal conditions of our experience in general. But I cannot profess to know this object; it is to me merely a something, to which, as the ground of systematic unity in cognition, I attribute such properties as are analogous to the conceptions employed by the understanding in the sphere of experience.