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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.

At the same time, this connection with the world of experience does not in the least augment the conception, although a possible perception has been added to the experience of the mind.

I cogitate myself in behalf of a possible experience, at the same time making abstraction of all actual experience; and infer therefrom that I can be conscious of myself apart from experience and its empirical conditions. 2. "From the impossibility of an infinite ascending series of causes in the world of sense a first cause is inferred"; a conclusion which the principles of the employment of reason do not justify even in the sphere of experience, and still less when an attempt is made to pass the limits of this sphere. If, thirdly, the question is whether we may not cogitate this being, which is distinct from the world, in analogy with the objects of experience? For they are not based upon experience and its known laws; and, without experience, they are a merely arbitrary conjunction of thoughts, which, though containing no internal contradiction, has no claim to objective reality, neither, consequently, to the possibility of such an object as is thought in these conceptions. In the elaboration of our experience, they may also be employed with great advantage, as heuristic [Footnote; From the Greek, eurhioko.] principles. Now if we compare these two cases, that of a person, who has very strong motives of interest or safety to forbear any action, and that of another, who lies under no such obligation, we shall find, according to the philosophy explained in the foregoing book, that the only known difference betwixt them lies in this, that in the former case we conclude from past experience, that the person never will perform that action, and in the latter, that he possibly or probably will perform it. Still less is it a constitutive principle of reason authorizing us to extend our conception of the sensuous world beyond all possible experience. The uniting principle among our internal perceptions is as unintelligible as that among external objects, and is not known to us any other way than by experience.

Thirdly, Even our sight informs us not of distance or outness (so to speak) immediately and without a certain reasoning and experience, as is acknowledged by the most rational philosophers.