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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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I should be justified, however, in applying these conceptions, in regard to their practical use, which is always directed to objects of experience--in conformity with their analogical significance when employed theoretically--to freedom and its subject. Nature, therefore, and transcendental freedom are distinguishable as conformity to law and lawlessness. The problem was merely this--whether freedom and natural necessity can exist without opposition in the same action. We cannot, therefore, escape the responsibility of at least a critical solution of the questions of reason, by complaints of the limited nature of our faculties, and the seemingly humble confession that it is beyond the power of our reason to decide, whether the world has existed from all eternity or had a beginning--whether it is infinitely extended, or enclosed within certain limits--whether anything in the world is simple, or whether everything must be capable of infinite divisibility--whether freedom can originate phenomena, or whether everything is absolutely dependent on the laws and order of nature--and, finally, whether there exists a being that is completely unconditioned and necessary, or whether the existence of everything is conditioned and consequently dependent on something external to itself, and therefore in its own nature contingent. The question, therefore, is; "Whether an effect, determined according to the laws of nature, can at the same time be produced by a free agent, or whether freedom and nature mutually exclude each other?" And here, the common but fallacious hypothesis of the absolute reality of phenomena manifests its injurious influence in embarrassing the procedure of reason. The existence of practical freedom can be proved from experience alone. Granted, that there does exist freedom in the transcendental sense, as a peculiar kind of causality, operating to produce events in the world--a faculty, that is to say, of originating a state, and consequently a series of consequences from that state.