They thus deprive us of the grand revelation which we obtain
through practical reason by means of the moral law, the revelation,
namely, of a supersensible world by the realization of the otherwise
transcendent concept of freedom, and by this deprive us also of the
moral law itself, which admits no empirical principle of
determination. Therefore it will be necessary to add something here as
a protection against this delusion and to exhibit empiricism in its
naked superficiality.
The notion of causality as physical necessity, in opposition to
the same notion as freedom, concerns only the existence of things so
far as it is determinable in time, and, consequently, as phenomena, in
opposition to their causality as things in themselves. Now if we
take the attributes of existence of things in time for attributes of
things in themselves (which is the common view), then it is impossible
to reconcile the necessity of the causal relation with freedom; they
are contradictory. For from the former it follows that every event,
and consequently every action that takes place at a certain point of
time, is a necessary result of what existed in time preceding.
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