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.
diately, because we cannot perceive anything, except so far as it appears, but it would nevertheless have to be conceived, according to the empirical character, as we must always admit in thought a transcendental object, as the foundation of phenomena, though we know nothing of what it is by itself.
In its empirical character, therefore, that subject, as a phenomenon, would submit, according to all determining laws, to a causal nexus, and in that respect it would be nothing but a part of the world of sense, the effects of which, like every other phenomenon, would arise from nature without fail. As soon as external phenomena began to influence it, and as soon as its empirical character, that is the law of its causality, had been known through experience, all its actions ought to admit of explanation, according to the laws of nature, and all that is requisite for its complete and necessary determination would be found in a possible experience.
In its intelligible character, however (though [p. 541] we could only have a general concept of it), the same subject would have to be considered free from all influence of sensibility, and from all determination through phenomena : and as in it, so far as it is a noiimenony nothing happens^ and no change which requires dynamical determination of time, and therefore no connection with phenomena as causes, can exist, that active being would so far be quite independent and free in its acts from all natural necessity, which can exist in the world of sense only. One might say of it with perfect truth that it originates its effects in the world of sense by itself, though the act does not begin in itself. And this would be perfectly true, though the effects in the world of sense need not
Transcendental Dialectic 439
therefore originate by themselves, because in it they are always determined previously through empirical conditions in the previous time, though only by means of the empirical character (which is the phenomenal appearance of the intelligible character), and therefore impossible, except as a continuation of the series of natural causes. In this way freedom and nature, each in its complete signification, might exist together and without any conflict in the same action, according as we refer it to its intelligible or to its sensible cause.
Explanation of the Cosmological Idea of Freedom [p. 542] in Connection with the General Necessity of Nature
I thought it best to give first this sketch of the solution of our transcendental problem, so that the course which reason has to adopt in its solution might be more clearly surveyed. We shall now proceed to explain more fully the points on which the decision properly rests, and examine each by itself.
The law of nature, that everything which happens has a cause, — that the causality of that cause, that is, its activity (as it is anterior in time, and, with regard to an effect which has arisen^ cannot itself have always existed, but must have happened at some time), must have its cause among the phenomena by which it is determined, and that therefore all events in the order of nature are empirically determined, this law, I say, through which alone phenomena become nature and objects of experience, is a law of the understanding, which can on no account be surrendered, and from which no single phenomenon can be exempted ; because in doing this we should place it outside all possible experience, separate from all objects of possible [p. 543]
440 Tratiscendental Dialectic experience, and change it into a mere fiction of the mind or a cobweb of the brain.
But although this looks merely like a chain of causes, which in the regressus to its conditions admits of no absolute totalityy this difficulty does not detain us in the least, because it has already been removed in the general criticism of the antinomy of reason when, starting from the series of phenomena, it aims at the unconditioned. Were we to yield to the illusion of transcendental realism, we should have neither nature nor freedom. The question therefore is, whether, if we recognise in the whole series of events nothing but natural necessity, we may yet regard the same event which on one side is an effect of nature only, on the other side, as an effect of freedom ; or whether there is a direct contradiction between these two kinds of causality }
There can certainly be nothing among phenomenal causes that could originate a series absolutely and by itself. Every action, as a phenomenon, so far as it produces an event, is itself an event, presupposing another state, in which its cause can be discovered ; and thus everything that happens is only a continuation of the series, and no beginning, happening by itself, is possible in it. Actions of natural causes in the succession of time are therefore themselves effects, which likewise [p. 544] presuppose causes in the series of time. A spontaneous and original action by which something takes place, which did not exist before, cannot be expected from the causal nexus of phenomena.
But is it really necessary that, if effects *are phenomena, the causality of their cause, which cause itself is phenomenal, could be nothing but empirical ; or is it not possible, although for every phenomenal effect a connection with its
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