Oyonale - Créations 3D et expériences graphiques
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Cliquer sur les phrases pour les voir dans leur contexte. Les textes de Immanuel Kant et David Hume sont disponibles auprès du Projet Gutenberg.
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But if we believe that everything in the world--be it condition or conditioned--is contingent; every given existence is too small for our conception. For philosophy informs us, that every thing, which appears to the mind, is nothing but a perception, and is interrupted, and dependent on the mind: whereas the vulgar confound perceptions and objects, and attribute a distinct continued existence to the very things they feel or see. 4 The absolute Completeness of the DEPENDENCE of the EXISTENCE of what is changeable in a phenomenon. For if the objects of our senses continue to exist, even when they are not perceived, their existence is of course independent of and distinct from the perception: and vice versa, if their existence be independent of the perception and distinct from it, they must continue to exist, even though they be not perceived. Now as the understanding possesses no other fundamental conceptions besides the categories, it takes for granted that an object considered as a thing in itself must be capable of being thought by means of these pure conceptions, and is thereby led to hold the perfectly undetermined conception of an intelligible existence, a something out of the sphere of our sensibility, for a determinate conception of an existence which we can cognize in some way or other by means of the understanding. In the last place this propension causes belief by means of the present impressions of the memory; since without the remembrance of former sensations, it is plain we never should have any belief of the continued existence of body. If, then, we are to possess a theoretical cognition of the absolute necessity of a thing, we cannot attain to this cognition otherwise than a priori by means of conceptions; while it is impossible in this way to cognize the existence of a cause which bears any relation to an existence given in experience. That is to say, the consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things without me. - But even the alternation of the existence and non-existence of a given state in a thing, in which all change consists, by no means proves the contingency of that state--the ground of proof being the reality of its opposite.