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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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Accordingly, as this cannot change in existence, its quantity in nature can neither be increased nor diminished. But if the rationalist is bold enough to construct, on the mere authority of the faculty of thought--without any intuition, whereby an object is given--a self-subsistent being, merely because the unity of apperception in thought cannot allow him to believe it a composite being, instead of declaring, as he ought to do, that he is unable to explain the possibility of a thinking nature; what ought to hinder the materialist, with as complete an independence of experience, to employ the principle of the rationalist in a directly opposite manner-- still preserving the formal unity required by his opponent?] it tears itself out of this state of uncertainty, the moment it casts a look upon the wondrous forms of nature and the majesty of the universe, and rises from height to height, from condition to condition, till it has elevated itself to the supreme and unconditioned author of all. For reason is thus confined within her own peculiar province--the arrangement of ends or aims, which is at the same time the arrangement of nature; and, as a practical faculty, without limiting itself to the latter, it is justified in extending the former, and with it our own existence, beyond the boundaries of experience and life. Now it is the nature of custom not only to operate with its full force, when objects are presented, that are exactly the, same with those to which we have been accustomed; but also to operate in an inferior degree, when we discover such as are similar; and though the habit loses somewhat of its force by every difference, yet it is seldom entirely destroyed, where any considerable circumstances remain the same. On the contrary, it is left completely undetermined what the nature or properties of this so-called ground may be.