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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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This freedom must not be described, in a merely negative manner, as independence of empirical conditions, for in this case the faculty of reason would cease to be a cause of phenomena; but it must be regarded, positively, as a faculty which can spontaneously originate a series of events. We shall study freedom under the teleological unity which accords with principles of reason; we shall look upon ourselves as acting in conformity with the divine will only in so far as we hold sacred the moral law which reason teaches us from the nature of actions themselves, and we shall believe that we can obey that will only by promoting the weal of the universe in ourselves and in others.
Because our company is expanding into several countries a year, yours could be the next one to become available. For, while in the consideration of freedom in the former antinomy, the thing itself--the cause (substantia phaenomenon)--was regarded as belonging to the series of conditions, and only its causality to the intelligible world--we are obliged in the present case to cogitate this necessary being as purely intelligible and as existing entirely apart from the world of sense (as an ens extramundanum); for otherwise it would be subject to the phenomenal law of contingency and dependence. 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. A causality of freedom is also necessary to account fully for these phenomena. The existence of practical freedom can be proved from experience alone.