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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 beside that experience in most instances seems to contradict this opinion, we may establish the relation of priority by a kind of inference or reasoning. 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. The understanding gives to experience, according to the subjective and formal conditions, of sensibility as well as of apperception, the rules which alone make this experience possible. These principles cannot be derived from experience, for it would give neither strict universality, nor apodeictic certainty. If the latter, then neither an universally valid, much less an apodeictic proposition can arise from it, for experience never can give us any such proposition. But, let it be granted that we could discover, not in experience, but in certain firmly-established a priori laws of the use of pure reason-- laws relating to our existence, authority to consider ourselves as legislating a priori in relation to our own existence and as determining this existence; we should, on this supposition, find ourselves possessed of a spontaneity, by which our actual existence would be determinable, without the aid of the conditions of empirical intuition. But as sensuous intuition is a peculiar subjective condition, which is a priori at the foundation of all perception, and the form of which is primitive, the form must be given per se, and so far from matter (or the things themselves which appear) lying at the foundation of experience (as we must conclude, if we judge by mere conceptions), the very possibility of itself presupposes, on the contrary, a given formal intuition (space and time).