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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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This faculty, accordingly, enounces laws, which are imperative or objective laws of freedom and which tell us what ought to take place, thus distinguishing themselves from the laws of nature, which relate to that which does take place. Hence those philosophers who adhere to the common opinion on this subject can never succeed in reconciling the ideas of nature and freedom. The idea of transcendental freedom, on the contrary, requires that reason--in relation to its causal power of commencing a series of phenomena--should be independent of all sensuous determining causes; and thus it seems to be in opposition to the law of nature and to all possible experience. It requires us, in the explanation of given phenomena (in the regress or ascent in the series), to proceed as if the series were infinite in itself, that is, were prolonged in indefinitum,; while on the other hand, where reason is regarded as itself the determining cause (in the region of freedom), we are required to proceed as if we had not before us an object of sense, but of the pure understanding. The question of transcendental freedom is purely speculative, and we may therefore set it entirely aside when we come to treat of practical reason. The second takes no account of our desires or the means of satisfying them, and regards only the freedom of a rational being, and the necessary conditions under which alone this freedom can harmonize with the distribution of happiness according to principles. But this systematic unity of ends in this world of intelligences- which, as mere nature, is only a world of sense, but, as a system of freedom of volition, may be termed an intelligible, that is, moral world (regnum gratiae)--leads inevitably also to the teleological unity of all things which constitute this great whole, according to universal natural laws--just as the unity of the former is according to universal and necessary moral laws--and unites the practical with the speculative reason.