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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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. 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. Reason, therefore, never applies directly to experience, or to any sensuous object; its object is, on the contrary, the understanding, to the manifold cognition of which it gives a unity a priori by means of conceptions--a unity which may be called rational unity, and which is of a nature very different from that of the unity produced by the understanding. We have been able, with very little trouble, to make it comprehensible how the conceptions of space and time, although a priori cognitions, must necessarily apply to external objects, and render a synthetical cognition of these possible, independently of all experience. Now it is evident, that this gradual encrease of assurance is nothing but the addition of new probabilities, and is derived from the constant union of causes and effects, according to past experience and observation. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of the thought to pass from causes to effects, and from effects to causes, according to their experienced union. Experience teaches us what is, but it cannot convince us that it might not have been otherwise. Why not you? Consequently they will not possess that immediate evidence which is peculiar to the former, although their application to experience does not, for that reason, lose its truth and certitude.