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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This reasoning a priori is confirmed by experience. Why did we not express ourselves in a manner exactly the reverse of this and, instead of accusing the cosmological idea of over stepping or of falling short of its true aim, possible experience, say that, in the first case, the empirical conception is always too small for the idea, and in the second too great, and thus attach the blame of these contradictions to the empirical regress? The second dialectical assertion possesses the peculiarity of having opposed to it a dogmatical proposition, which, among all such sophistical statements, is the only one that undertakes to prove in the case of an object of experience, that which is properly a transcendental idea--the absolute simplicity of substance. No one can find an intuition which shall correspond to the conception of reality, except in experience; it cannot be presented to the mind a priori and antecedently to the empirical consciousness of a reality. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. They are not copies, imitations or VCD's I shall, therefore, restrict myself to the simple and equitable demand that such reasoners will demonstrate, from the nature of the human mind as well as from that of the other sources of knowledge, how we are to proceed to extend our cognition completely a priori, and to carry it to that point where experience abandons us, and no means exist of guaranteeing the objective reality of our conceptions. And, indeed, how should it be possible, merely by the aid of the unity of consciousness--which we cognize only for the reason that it is indispensable to the possibility of experience--to pass the bounds of experience (our existence in this life); and to extend our cognition to the nature of all thinking beings by means of the empirical--but in relation to every sort of intuition, perfectly undetermined--proposition, "I think"? By it alone we could, therefore, never determine whether this manifold, as an object of experience, is coexistent or successive, unless it had for a foundation something fixed and permanent, of the existence of which all succession and coexistence are nothing but so many modes (modi of time). In such a case, we merely fail to find the additional form of unity we expected, but we do not lose the rational unity which the mind requires in its procedure in experience.