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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 is no stumbling-block in the way, even assuming the idea to be a pure fiction, to admit that there are some natural causes in the possession of a faculty which is not empirical, but intelligible, inasmuch as it is not determined to action by empirical conditions, but purely and solely upon grounds brought forward by the understanding--this action being still, when the cause is phenomenized, in perfect accordance with the laws of empirical causality.

 
From what has been said, it follows that a causality must be admitted, by means of which something happens, without its cause being determined according to necessary laws by some other cause preceding.
 The proposition therefore--if all causality is possible only in accordance with the laws of nature--is, when stated in this unlimited and general manner, self-contradictory. Now, is it absolutely necessary that, granting that all effects are phenomena, the causality of the cause of these effects must also be a phenomenon and belong to the empirical world? For it cannot be alleged that, instead of the laws of nature, laws of freedom may be introduced into the causality of the course of nature. In the idea, pure reason possesses even causality and the power of producing that which its conception contains. In the above argument, it is inferred from the analogy of certain products of nature with those of human art, when it compels Nature to bend herself to its purposes, as in the case of a house, a ship, or a watch, that the same kind of causality--namely, understanding and will--resides in nature. Thirdly, suppose that every event in the world happens in accordance with the laws of nature; the causality of a cause must itself be an event and necessitates a regress to a still higher cause, and consequently the unceasing prolongation of the series of conditions a parte priorI. Operative nature is therefore too large for every conception we can form in the synthesis of cosmical events. But the only existence cognized, under the condition of other given phenomena, as necessary, is the existence of effects from given causes in conformity with the laws of causality.