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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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For it was these very laws, the internal practical necessity of which led us to the hypothesis of an independent cause, or of a wise ruler of the universe, who should give them effect. Let it be supposed, that there is no other kind of causality than that according to the laws of nature. Our blame of the offender is grounded upon a law of reason, which requires us to regard this faculty as a cause, which could have and ought to have otherwise determined the behaviour of the culprit, independently of all empirical conditions. Let us take, for example, the conception of cause, which indicates a peculiar kind of synthesis, namely, that with something, A, something entirely different, B, is connected according to a law. That the word has a beginning--that the nature of my thinking self is simple, and therefore indestructible--that I am a free agent, and raised above the compulsion of nature and her laws--and, finally, that the entire order of things, which form the world, is dependent upon a Supreme Being, from whom the whole receives unity and connection--these are so many foundation-stones of morality and religion. 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. Nor need we fear, that our attachment to this law will diminish upon account of the seeming frivolousness of those interests, by which it is determined. For by this new method we are enabled perfectly to explain the possibility of a priori cognition, and, what is more, to demonstrate satisfactorily the laws which lie a priori at the foundation of nature, as the sum of the objects of experience--neither of which was possible according to the procedure hitherto followed. There is no such thing as freedom, but everything in the world happens solely according to the laws of nature. Banned in the USA!