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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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Thus the supposition of a Supreme Being or cause is purely relative; it is cogitated only in behalf of the systematic unity of experience; such a being is but a something, of whose existence in itself we have not the least conception.

 If I wish to investigate the properties of a thinking being, I must interrogate experience. In the same manner, the possibility of continuous quantities, indeed of quantities in general, for the conceptions of them are without exception synthetical, is never evident from the conceptions in themselves, but only when they are considered as the formal conditions of the determination of objects in experience. For they would not even be possible a priori, if we could not rely on the assistance of pure intuition (in mathematics), or on that of the conditions of a possible experience. The conceptions of understanding are also cogitated a priori antecedently to experience, and render it possible; but they contain nothing but the unity of reflection upon phenomena, in so far as these must necessarily belong to a possible empirical consciousness. For they would not even be possible a priori, if we could not rely on the assistance of pure intuition (in mathematics), or on that of the conditions of a possible experience. But where reason is not held in a plain track by the influence of empirical or of pure intuition, that is, when it is employed in the transcendental sphere of pure conceptions, it stands in great need of discipline, to restrain its propensity to overstep the limits of possible experience and to keep it from wandering into error. Every general proposition, even if derived from experience by the process of induction, may serve as the major in a syllogism; but it is not for that reason a principle. For if the objects to which those principles must be applied were things in themselves, it would be quite impossible to cognize aught concerning them synthetically a priorI. But they are nothing but phenomena; a complete knowledge of which--a knowledge to which all principles a priori must at last relate--is the only possible experience.