Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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The translator’s English as printed (F. Max Müller). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
solute totality of the conditions in causal relations, reason creates for itself the idea of spontaneity, or the power of beginning by itself, without an antecedent cause determining it to action, according to the law of causal connection.
It is extremely remarkable, that the practical concept of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom^ which constitutes indeed the real difficulty which at all times has surrounded the question of the possibility of freedom. Freedo7n, in its practical sense^ is the [p. 534] independence of our (arbitrary) will from the coe7xion through sensuous impulses. Our (arbitrary) will is sensuotcSy so far as it is affected pathologically (by sensuous impulses) ; it is called animal {arbitrinni brutiijn)^ if necessitated pathologically. The human will is certainly sensuous, an arbitrium sensitivicnty but not brnttim, but liberuniy because sensuous impulses do not necessitate its action, but there is in man a faculty of determination, independent of the necessitation through sensuous impulses.
It can easily be seen that, if all causality in the world of sense belonged to nature, every event would be determined in time through another, according to necessary laws. As therefore the phenomena, in determining the will, would render every act necessary as their natural effect, the annihilation of transcendental freedom would at the same time destroy all practical freedom. Practical freedom presupposes that, although something has not happened, it ought to have happened, and that its cause therefore had not that determining force among phenomena, which could prevent the causality of our will from producing, independently of those natural causes, and even contrary to their force and influence, something dear
434 Transcendental Dialectic termined in the order of time, according to empirical laws, and from originating entirely by itself 2, series of events.
What happens here is what happens generally [p. 535] in the conflict of reason venturing beyond the limits of possible experience, namely, that the problem is not physiological, but transcendental. Hence the question of the possibility of freedom concerns no doubt psychology ; but its solution, as it depends on dialectical arguments of pure reason, belongs entirely to transcendental philosophy. In order to enable that philosophy to give a satisfactory answer, which it cannot decline to do, I must first try to determine more accurately its proper procedure in this task.
If phenomena were things by themselves, and therefore space and time forms of the existence of things by themselves, the conditions together with the conditioned would always belong, as members, to one and the same series, and thus in our case also, the antinomy which is common to all transcendental ideas would arise, namely, that that series is inevitably too large or too small for the understanding. The dynamical concepts of reason, however, which we have to discuss in this and the following section, have this peculiarity that, as they are not concerned with an object, considered as a quantity, but only with its existence, we need take no account of the quantity of the series of conditions. All depends here only on [p. 536] the dynamical relation of conditions to the conditioned, so that in the question on nature and freedom we at once meet with the difficulty, whether freedom is indeed possible, and whether, if it is possible, it can exist together with the universality of the natural law of causality. The question in fact arises, whether it is a proper disjunctive proposition to say, that every effect in the world must arise.
Transcendental Dialectic 435
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