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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 something we cannot, following the analogy of a real substance, cogitate otherwise than as the cause of all things operating in accordance with rational laws, if we regard it as an individual object; although we should rest contented with the idea alone as a regulative principle of reason, and make no attempt at completing the sum of the conditions imposed by thought. But though it be possible for men to maintain a small uncultivated society without government, it is impossible they should maintain a society of any kind without justice, and the observance of those three fundamental laws concerning the stability of possession, its translation by consent, and the performance of promises. Freedom--independence of the laws of nature--is certainly a deliverance from restraint, but it is also a relinquishing of the guidance of law and rule. For, not to mention that such an argument would not have a transcendental character, nor have been limited to the discussion of pure conceptions--all attempts at inferring from experience what cannot be cogitated in accordance with its laws, must ever be unsuccessful. But even a miscarriage of this sort cannot affect the law in its general and teleological relations. For by this new method we are enabled perfectly to explain the possibility of a priori cognition, and, what is more, to demonstrate satisfactorily the laws which lie a priori at the foundation of nature, as the sum of the objects of experience--neither of which was possible according to the procedure hitherto followed. The first is the conjunction of a particular state with another preceding it in the world of sense, the former following the latter by virtue of a law.