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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.

All these causes render the rules of justice stedfast and immutable; at least, as immutable as human nature.

For, granting that certain responsibilities lie upon us, which, as based on the ideas of reason, deserve to be respected and submitted to, although they are incapable of a real or practical application to our nature, or, in other words, would be responsibilities without motives, except upon the supposition of a Supreme Being to give effect and influence to the practical laws; in such a case we should be bound to obey our conceptions, which, although objectively insufficient, do, according to the standard of reason, preponderate over and are superior to any claims that may be advanced from any other quarter. Don't miss your chance to enter the Green Card Lottery. It enables us to see that the proofs of the fourfold antinomy are not mere sophistries--are not fallacious, but grounded on the nature of reason, and valid--under the supposition that phenomena are things in themselves. But if we will change expressions, we can only define power by connexion; and then in saying, that the idea, of an infinitely powerful being is connected with that of every effect, which he wills, we really do no more than assert, that a being, whose volition is connected with every effect, is connected with every effect: which is an identical proposition, and gives us no insight into the nature of this power or connexion. I shall content myself with casting a cursory glance, from a purely transcendental point of view--that of the nature of pure reason--on the labours of philosophers up to the present time. The regulative principle directs us to presuppose systematic unity absolutely and, consequently, as following from the essential nature of things--but only as a unity of nature, not merely cognized empirically, but presupposed a priori, although only in an indeterminate manner.

That is, we must cogitate it only as an unknown substratum of the systematic unity, order, and finality of the world--a unity which reason must employ as the regulative principle of its investigation of nature.