Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller

368 Transcendental Dialectic

Thesis course of the world. For we are speaking here of the absolutely first beginning, not according to time, but according to causality. If, for instance, at this moment I rise from my chair with perfect freedom, without the necessary determining influence of natural causes, a new series has its absolute beginning in this event, with all its natural consequences ad infinitum^ although, with regard to time, this event is only the continuation of a preceding series. For this determination and this act do not belong to the succession of merely natural effects, nor are they a mere continuation of them, but the determining natural causes completely stop before it, so far as this event is concerned, which no doubt follows them, and does not result from them, and may therefore be called an absolutely first beginning in a series of phenomena, not with reference to time, but with reference to causality.

This requirement of reason to appeal in the series of natural causes to a first and free beginning is fully confirmed if we see that, with the exception of the Epicurean school, all philosophers of antiquity have felt themselves obliged to admit, for the sake of explaining all cosmical movements, a prime mover^ that is, a freely acting cause which, first and by itself, started this series of states. They did not attempt to make a first beginning comprehensible by an appeal to nature only.

Transcendental Dialectic 369

Antithesis experience). But to attribute in the world itself a faculty to substances can never be allowed, because in that case the connection of phenomena determining each other by necessity and according to general laws, which we call nature, and with it the test of empirical truth, which distinguishes experience from dreams, would almost entirely disappear. For by the side of such a lawless faculty of freedom, nature could hardly be conceived any longer, because the laws of the latter would be constantly changed through the influence of the former, and the play of phenomena which, according to nature, is regular and uniform, would become confused and incoherent.

2B

370 Transcendental Dialectic

Thesis

[p. 452] . THE ANTINOMY

FOURTH CONFLICT OF THE

Thesis

There exists an absolutely necessary Being belonging to the world, either as a part or as a cause of it.

Proof

The world of sense, as the sum total of all phenomena, contains a series of changes without which even the representation of a series of time, which forms the condition of the possibility of the world of sense, would not be given us.^ But every change has its condition which precedes it in time, and renders it necessary. Now, everything that is given as conditional presupposes, with regard to its existence, a complete series of conditions, leading up to that which is entirely unconditioned, and alone absolutely necessary. Something absolutely necessary therefore must exist, if there exists a change as its consequence. And this absolutely necessary belongs itself to the world of sense. For if we supposed that it existed outside that world, then the series of changes in the world would derive its origin from it, while the necessary cause itself would not be- [p. 454] long to the world of sense. But this is impossible. For

1 As formal condition of the possibility of changes, time is no doubt objectively prior to them (read dissen instead of disser^ ; subjectively, however, and in the reality of our consciousness the representation of time, like every other, is occasioned solely by perceptions.

Transcendental Dialectic 371

Antithesis

OF PURE REASON [p. 453]

TRANSCENDENTAL IDEAS

Antithesis

There nowhere exists an absolutely necessary Being, either within or without the world, as the cause of it.

Proof