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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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The existence of practical freedom can be proved from experience alone. Now we make use of a great number of empirical conceptions, without opposition from any one; and consider ourselves, even without any attempt at deduction, justified in attaching to them a sense, and a supposititious signification, because we have always experience at hand to demonstrate their objective reality. But the question in the present case is evidently synthetical--it aims at the extension of our cognition beyond the bounds of experience--it requires an assurance respecting the existence of a being corresponding with the idea in our minds, to which no experience can ever be adequate. For, as regards a vacuum or void, which we may cogitate as out and beyond the field of possible experience (the world), such a question cannot come before the tribunal of mere understanding, which decides only upon questions that concern the employment of given phenomena for the construction of empirical cognition. I should be justified, however, in applying these conceptions, in regard to their practical use, which is always directed to objects of experience--in conformity with their analogical significance when employed theoretically--to freedom and its subject. But as experience will sufficiently convince any one, who thinks it worth while to try, that though he can find no error in the foregoing arguments, yet he still continues to believe, and think, and reason as usual, he may safely conclude, that his reasoning and belief is some sensation or peculiar manner of conception, which it is impossible for mere ideas and reflections to destroy.