| According to these opinions, it is by means of the perception and comparison of similar consequences following upon certain antecedent phenomena that the understanding is led to the discovery of a rule, according to which certain events always follow certain phenomena, and it is only by this process that we attain to the conception of cause. |
| Upon such a basis, it is clear that this conception must be merely empirical, and the rule which it furnishes us with--"Everything that happens must have a cause"--would be just as contingent as experience itself. |
| The universality and necessity of the rule or law would be perfectly spurious attributes of it. |
| Indeed, it could not possess universal validity, inasmuch as it would not in this case be a priori, but founded on deduction. |
| But the same is the case with this law as with other pure a priori representations (e.g., space and time), which we can draw in perfect clearness and completeness from experience, only because we had already placed them therein, and by that means, and by that alone, had rendered experience possible. |
| Indeed, the logical clearness of this representation of a rule, determining the series of events, is possible only when we have made use thereof in experience. |
| Nevertheless, the recognition of this rule, as a condition of the synthetical unity of phenomena in time, was the ground of experience itself and consequently preceded it a priorI. It is now our duty to show by an example that we never, even in experience, attribute to an object the notion of succession or effect (of an event--that is, the happening of something that did not exist before), and distinguish it from the subjective succession of apprehension, unless when a rule lies at the foundation, which compels us to observe this order of perception in preference to any other, and that, indeed, it is this necessity which first renders possible the representation of a succession in the object. |
| We have representations within us, of which also we can be conscious. |
| But, however widely extended, however accurate and thoroughgoing this consciousness may be, these representations are still nothing more than representations, that is, internal determinations of the mind in this or that relation of time. |
| Now how happens it that to these representations we should set an object, or that, in addition to their subjective reality, as modifications, we should still further attribute to them a certain unknown objective reality? |
| It is clear that objective significancy cannot consist in a relation to another representation (of that which we desire to term object), for in that case the question again arises; "How does this other representation go out of itself, and obtain objective significancy over and above the subjective, which is proper to it, as a determination of a state of mind?" If we try to discover what sort of new property the relation to an object gives to our subjective representations, and what new importance they thereby receive, we shall find that this relation has no other effect than that of rendering necessary the connection of our representations in a certain manner, and of subjecting them to a rule; and that conversely, it is only because a certain order is necessary in the relations of time of our representations, that objective significancy is ascribed to them. |
| In the synthesis of phenomena, the manifold of our representations is always successive. |
| Now hereby is not represented an object, for by means of this succession, which is common to all apprehension, no one thing is distinguished from another. |
| But so soon as I perceive or assume that in this succession there is a relation to a state antecedent, from which the representation follows in accordance with a rule, so soon do I represent something as an event, or as a thing that happens; in other words, I cognize an object to which I must assign a certain determinate position in time, which cannot be altered, because of the preceding state in the object. |
| When, therefore, I perceive that something happens, there is contained in this representation, in the first place, the fact, that something antecedes; because, it. |
| is only in relation to this that the phenomenon obtains its proper relation of time, in other words, exists after an antecedent time, in which it did not exist. |
| But it can receive its determined place in time only by the presupposition that something existed in the foregoing state, upon which it follows inevitably and always, that is, in conformity with a rule. |
| From all this it is evident that, in the first place, I cannot reverse the order of succession, and make that which happens precede that upon which it follows; and that, in the second place, if the antecedent state be posited, a certain determinate event inevitably and necessarily follows. |
| Hence it follows that there exists a certain order in our representations, whereby the present gives a sure indication of some previously existing state, as a correlate, though still undetermined, of the existing event which is given--a correlate which itself relates to the event as its consequence, conditions it, and connects it necessarily with itself in the series of time. |
| If then it be admitted as a necessary law of sensibility, and consequently a formal condition of all perception, that the preceding necessarily determines the succeeding time (inasmuch as I cannot arrive at the succeeding except through the preceding), it must likewise be an indispensable law of empirical representation of the series of time that the phenomena of the past determine all phenomena in the succeeding time, and that the latter, as events, cannot take place, except in so far as the former determine their existence in time, that is to say, establish it according to a rule. |
| For it is of course only in phenomena that we can empirically cognize this continuity in the connection of times. |