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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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Fourthly, the conceptions of the possible, the actual, and the necessary do not conduct us to any series--excepting only in so far as the contingent in existence must always be regarded as conditioned, and as indicating, according to a law of the understanding, a condition, under which it is necessary to rise to a higher, till in the totality of the series, reason arrives at unconditioned necessity. If the diversity existing in phenomena--a diversity not of form (for in this they may be similar) but of content--were so great that the subtlest human reason could never by comparison discover in them the least similarity (which is not impossible), in this case the logical law of genera would be without foundation, the conception of a genus, nay, all general conceptions would be impossible, and the faculty of the understanding, the exercise of which is restricted to the world of conceptions, could not exist. I call the world a moral world, in so far as it may be in accordance with all the ethical laws--which, by virtue of the freedom of reasonable beings, it can be, and according to the necessary laws of morality it ought to be. But all laws of nature, without distinction, are subject to higher principles of the understanding, inasmuch as the former are merely applications of the latter to particular cases of experience. Experience must be superadded in order to know these particular laws; but in regard to experience in general, and everything that can be cognized as an object thereof, these a priori laws are our only rule and guide. If we prefer examples, which are real, to such as are feigned, we may consider the following one, which is to be met with In almost every writer, that has treated of the laws of nature.