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Cliquer sur les phrases pour les voir dans leur contexte. Les textes de Immanuel Kant et David Hume sont disponibles auprès du Projet Gutenberg.
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The same continued and uninterrupted Being may, therefore, be sometimes present to the mind, and sometimes absent from it, without any real or essential change in the Being itself. The custom operates before we have time for reflection. Why wonder what is going on...? Metaphysics, as here represented, is the only science which admits of completion--and with little labour, if it is united, in a short time; so that nothing will be left to future generations except the task of illustrating and applying it didactically. The capacity of the mind is not infinite; consequently no idea of extension or duration consists of an infinite number of parts or inferior ideas, but of a finite number, and these simple and indivisible: It is therefore possible for space and time to exist conformable to this idea: And if it be possible, it is certain they actually do exist conformable to it; since their infinite divisibility is utterly impossible and contradictory. For if in time we could never arrive at an end of division, and if each moment, as it succeeds another, were not perfectly single and indivisible, there would be an infinite number of co-existent moments, or parts of time; which I believe will be allowed to be an arrant contradiction. According to this way of thinking, we ought not to receive as reasoning any of the observations we may make concerning identity, and the relations of time and .place; since in none of them the mind can go beyond what is immediately present to the senses, either to discover the real existence or the relations of objects. Time and custom give authority to all forms of government, and all successions of princes; and that power, which at first was founded only on injustice and violence, becomes in time legal and obligatory. For that would be to run in a circle, and make one idea depend on another, while at the same time the latter depends on the former. Without community, every perception (of a phenomenon in space) is separated from every other and isolated, and the chain of empirical representations, that is, of experience, must, with the appearance of a new object, begin entirely de novo, without the least connection with preceding representations, and without standing towards these even in the relation of time.