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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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But, it will be asked further, can I make any use of this conception and hypothesis in my investigations into the world and nature?

 And this is easily accounted for from the known properties of human nature. Take, for example, the theistic proposition; There is a Supreme Being; and on the other hand, the atheistic counter-statement; There exists no Supreme Being; or, in psychology; Everything that thinks possesses the attribute of absolute and permanent unity, which is utterly different from the transitory unity of material phenomena; and the counter-proposition; The soul is not an immaterial unity, and its nature is transitory, like that of phenomena. If, then, I could understand the nature of a cosmological idea and perceive, before I entered on the discussion of the subject at all, that, whatever side of the question regarding the unconditioned of the regressive synthesis of phenomena it favoured--it must either be too great or too small for every conception of the understanding--I would be able to comprehend how the idea, which relates to an object of experience--an experience which must be adequate to and in accordance with a possible conception of the understanding--must be completely void and without significance, inasmuch as its object is inadequate, consider it as we may. The principle of causality, and, by consequence, the mechanism of nature as determined by causality, would then have absolute validity in relation to all things as efficient causes. These three particulars form the whole nature of the dye, so far as relates to our present purpose; and consequently are the only circumstances regarded by the mind in its forming a judgment concerning the result of such a throw. Hence the investigation of nature receives a teleological direction, and becomes, in its widest extension, physico-theology. With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. Reason, therefore, never applies directly to experience, or to any sensuous object; its object is, on the contrary, the understanding, to the manifold cognition of which it gives a unity a priori by means of conceptions--a unity which may be called rational unity, and which is of a nature very different from that of the unity produced by the understanding. Every different object appears to them entirely distinct and separate; and they perceive, that it is not from a view of the nature and qualities of objects we infer one from another, but only when in several instances we observe them to have been constantly conjoined.