Oyonale - 3D art and graphic experiments
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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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These representations, in so far as they are connected and determinable in this relation (in space and time) according to laws of the unity of experience, are called objects. A beginning is an existence which is preceded by a time in which the thing does not exist. This is that an event cannot be determined in time, and consequently cannot form a part of experience, unless it stands under this dynamical law. Precisely the same is the case with every, even the smallest, portion of time. A man, dangerously wounded, who promises a competent sum to a surgeon to cure him, would certainly be bound to performance; though the case be not so much different from that of one, who promises a sum to a robber, as to produce so great a difference in our sentiments of morality, if these sentiments were not built entirely on public interest and convenience. Now the principle of contradiction as a merely logical proposition must not by any means limit its application merely to relations of time, and consequently a formula like the preceding is quite foreign to its true purpose. The world has a beginning in time, and is also limited in regard to space. That "bodies are extended" is not an empirical judgement, but a proposition which stands firm a priorI. For before addressing myself to experience, I already have in my conception all the requisite conditions for the judgement, and I have only to extract the predicate from the conception, according to the principle of contradiction, and thereby at the same time become conscious of the necessity of the judgement, a necessity which I could never learn from experience. This first is called, in relation to past time, the beginning of the world; in relation to space, the limit of the world; in relation to the parts of a given limited whole, the simple; in relation to causes, absolute spontaneity (liberty); and in relation to the existence of changeable things, absolute physical necessity.