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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 this again presupposes, in conformity with the law of nature, a previous condition and its causality, and this another anterior to the former, and so on. But, as there has thus been proved the existence of a faculty which can of itself originate a series in time--although we are unable to explain how it can exist--we feel ourselves authorized to admit, even in the midst of the natural course of events, a beginning, as regards causality, of different successions of phenomena, and at the same time to attribute to all substances a faculty of free action. A belief in the reciprocal causality of phenomena is necessary, if we are required to look for and to present the natural conditions of natural events, that is to say, their causes. All the paths conducting to this end begin either from determinate experience and the peculiar constitution of the world of sense, and rise, according to the laws of causality, from it to the highest cause existing apart from the world--or from a purely indeterminate experience, that is, some empirical existence--or abstraction is made of all experience, and the existence of a supreme cause is concluded from a priori conceptions alone. 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? 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. A causality of freedom is also necessary to account fully for these phenomena. [*Footnote; Nature, understood adjective (formaliter), signifies the complex of the determinations of a thing, connected according to an internal principle of causality.