Oyonale - 3D art and graphic experiments
ThinkSpam
Click on the phrases to see them in context. The original texts by Immanuel Kant and David Hume are available from the Gutenberg Projet.
.
The foregoing deduction is an exposition of the pure conceptions of the understanding (and with them of all theoretical a priori cognition), as principles of the possibility of experience, but of experience as the determination of all phenomena in space and time in general--of experience, finally, from the principle of the original synthetical unity of apperception, as the form of the understanding in relation to time and space as original forms of sensibility. If it is finite and limited, we have a right to ask; "What determines these limits?" Void space is not a self-subsistent correlate of things, and cannot be a final condition--and still less an empirical condition, forming a part of a possible experience. But in this representation we cannot find any knowledge of the subject, and therefore also no empirical knowledge, that is, experience. Suppose, that instead of the virtue or vice of a son or brother, which causes first love or hatred, and afterwards pride or humility, we place these good or bad qualities on ourselves, without any immediate connexion with the person, who is related to us: Experience shews us, that by this change of situation the whole chain is broke, and that the mind is not conveyed from one passion to another, as in the preceding instance. For experience contains, in addition to the thought of something existing, intuition, and in this case it must be internal intuition, that is, time, in relation to which the subject must be determined. Consequently the coexistence of substances in space cannot be cognized in experience otherwise than under the precondition of their reciprocal action. Hence the principles of the mathematical use of the categories will possess a character of absolute necessity, that is, will be apodeictic; those, on the other hand, of the dynamical use, the character of an a priori necessity indeed, but only under the condition of empirical thought in an experience, therefore only mediately and indirectly. For to except even a single phenomenon from its operation is to exclude it from the sphere of possible experience and thus to admit it to be a mere fiction of thought or phantom of the brain. Thus, then, appears the vanity of the hope of establishing a cognition which is to extend its rule beyond the limits of experience--a cognition which is one of the highest interests of humanity; and thus is proved the futility of the attempt of speculative philosophy in this region of thought.