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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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It is not our business to inquire here into the utility of this principle in the investigation of nature. passions, desires, and emotions, which principally deserve our attention, arise mostly from ideas, it will be necessary to reverse that method, which at first sight seems most natural; and in order to explain the nature and principles of the human mind, give a particular account of ideas, before we proceed to impressions. In other words, we must restrict the sphere of opinion to the world of experience and nature. Our opponent mistakes the absence of empirical conditions for a proof of the complete impossibility of all that we have asserted; and we have to show him that be has not exhausted the whole sphere of possibility and that he can as little compass that sphere by the laws of experience and nature, as we can lay a secure foundation for the operations of reason beyond the region of experience. It is a quality observable in human nature, and which we shall endeavour to explain afterwards, that every thing, which is often presented. Men's tempers are different, and some have a propensity to the tender, and others to the rougher, affections: But in the main, we may affirm, that man in general, or human nature, is nothing but the object both of love and hatred, and requires some other cause, which by a double relation of impressions and ideas, may excite these passions. It is a quality observable in human nature, and which we shall endeavour to explain afterwards, that every thing, which is often presented. Take, for example, the theistic proposition; There is a Supreme Being; and on the other hand, the atheistic counter-statement; There exists no Supreme Being; or, in psychology; Everything that thinks possesses the attribute of absolute and permanent unity, which is utterly different from the transitory unity of material phenomena; and the counter-proposition; The soul is not an immaterial unity, and its nature is transitory, like that of phenomena. For although we may convict an anatomist of an error, when he connects the limb of some animal with a certain purpose, it is quite impossible to prove in a single case that any arrangement of nature, be it what it may, is entirely without aim or design.