| But, if you are rash enough to deny the enigmatical secrets of nature for this reason, you will find yourselves obliged to deny also the existence of many fundamental properties of natural objects (such as fundamental forces), which you can just as little comprehend; and even the possibility of so simple a conception as that of change must present to you insuperable difficulties. |
| For if experience did not teach you that it was real, you never could conceive a priori the possibility of this ceaseless sequence of being and non-being. |
| But if the existence of a transcendental faculty of freedom is granted--a faculty of originating changes in the world--this faculty must at least exist out of and apart from the world; although it is certainly a bold assumption, that, over and above the complete content of all possible intuitions, there still exists an object which cannot be presented in any possible perception. |
| But, to attribute to substances in the world itself such a faculty, is quite inadmissible; for, in this case; the connection of phenomena reciprocally determining and determined according to general laws, which is termed nature, and along with it the criteria of empirical truth, which enable us to distinguish experience from mere visionary dreaming, would almost entirely disappear. |
| In proximity with such a lawless faculty of freedom, a system of nature is hardly cogitable; for the laws of the latter would be continually subject to the intrusive influences of the former, and the course of phenomena, which would otherwise proceed regularly and uniformly, would become thereby confused and disconnected. |
| FOURTH CONFLICT OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS. |
| THESIS. |
| There exists either in, or in connection with the world--either as a part of it, or as the cause of it--an absolutely necessary being. |
| PROOF. |
| The world of sense, as the sum total of all phenomena, contains a series of changes. |
| For, without such a series, the mental representation of the series of time itself, as the condition of the possibility of the sensuous world, could not be presented to us.* But every change stands under its condition, which precedes it in time and renders it necessary. |
| Now the existence of a given condition presupposes a complete series of conditions up to the absolutely unconditioned, which alone is absolutely necessary. |
| It follows that something that is absolutely necessary must exist, if change exists as its consequence. |
| But this necessary thing itself belongs to the sensuous world. |
| For suppose it to exist out of and apart from it, the series of cosmical changes would receive from it a beginning, and yet this necessary cause would not itself belong to the world of sense. |
| But this is impossible. |
| For, as the beginning of a series in time is determined only by that which precedes it in time, the supreme condition of the beginning of a series of changes must exist in the time in which this series itself did not exist; for a beginning supposes a time preceding, in which the thing that begins to be was not in existence. |
| The causality of the necessary cause of changes, and consequently the cause itself, must for these reasons belong to time--and to phenomena, time being possible only as the form of phenomena. |
| Consequently, it cannot be cogitated as separated from the world of sense--the sum total of all phenomena. |
| There is, therefore, contained in the world, something that is absolutely necessary--whether it be the whole cosmical series itself, or only a part of it. |
| [*Footnote; Objectively, time, as the formal condition of the possibility of change, precedes all changes; but subjectively, and in consciousness, the representation of time, like every other, is given solely by occasion of perception.] |