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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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If, on the other hand, we were to ask Priestley--a philosopher who had no taste for transcendental speculation, but was entirely devoted to the principles of empiricism--what his motives were for overturning those two main pillars of religion--the doctrines of the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul (in his view the hope of a future life is but the expectation of the miracle of resurrection)- this philosopher, himself a zealous and pious teacher of religion, could give no other answer than this; I acted in the interest of reason, which always suffers, when certain objects are explained and judged by a reference to other supposed laws than those of material nature--the only laws which we know in a determinate manner. A causality of freedom is also necessary to account fully for these phenomena. We must understand, on the contrary, by the term freedom, in the cosmological sense, a faculty of the spontaneous origination of a state; the causality of which, therefore, is not subordinated to another cause determining it in time. The idea of a moral world has, therefore, objective reality, not as referring to an object of intelligible intuition--for of such an object we can form no conception whatever--but to the world of sense--conceived, however, as an object of pure reason in its practical use--and to a corpus mysticum of rational beings in it, in so far as the liberum arbitrium of the individual is placed, under and by virtue of moral laws, in complete systematic unity both with itself and with the freedom of all others. We must understand, on the contrary, by the term freedom, in the cosmological sense, a faculty of the spontaneous origination of a state; the causality of which, therefore, is not subordinated to another cause determining it in time. If we permit ourselves to be deceived by the illusion of transcendental idealism, we shall find that neither nature nor freedom exists. [*Footnote; The science of Metaphysics has for the proper object of its inquiries only three grand ideas; GOD, FREEDOM, and IMMORTALITY, and it aims at showing, that the second conception, conjoined with the first, must lead to the third, as a necessary conclusion.