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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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Now the nature and effects of experience have been already sufficiently examined and explained. That is to say, there must exist an absolute spontaneity of cause, which of itself originates a series of phenomena which proceeds according to natural laws--consequently transcendental freedom, without which even in the course of nature the succession of phenomena on the side of causes is never complete. And nature (considered merely as nature in general) is dependent on them. We employ the idea of the simple nature of the human soul as the foundation of all the theories we may form of its phenomena; but when we meet with difficulties in our way, when we observe in the soul phenomena similar to the changes which take place in matter, we require to call in new auxiliary hypotheses. The subject of the human mind being so copious and various, I shall here take advantage of this vulgar and spacious division, that I may proceed with the greater order; and having said ali I thought necessary concerning our ideas, shall now explain those violent emotions or passions, their nature, origin, causes, and effects. Even the laws of nature, if they are contemplated as principles of the empirical use of the understanding, possess also a characteristic of necessity, and we may therefore at least expect them to be determined upon grounds which are valid a priori and antecedent to all experience. For, in the latter case, it would come later than the system; whereas it is really itself the parent of all that is systematic in our cognition of nature. 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.