In fact,
in the question about the freedom which must be the foundation of
all moral laws and the consequent responsibility, it does not matter
whether the principles which necessarily determine causality by a
physical law reside within the subject or without him, or in the
former case whether these principles are instinctive or are
conceived by reason, if, as is admitted by these men themselves, these
determining ideas have the ground of their existence in time and in
the antecedent state, and this again in an antecedent, etc. Then it
matters not that these are internal; it matters not that they have a
psychological and not a mechanical causality, that is, produce actions
by means of ideas and not by bodily movements; they are still
determining principles of the causality of a being whose existence
is determinable in time, and therefore under the necessitation of
conditions of past time, which therefore, when the subject has to act,
are no longer in his power. This may imply psychological freedom (if
we choose to apply this term to a merely internal chain of ideas in
the mind), but it involves physical necessity and, therefore, leaves
no room for transcendental freedom, which must be conceived as
independence on everything empirical, and, consequently, on nature
generally, whether it is an object of the internal sense considered in
time only, or of the external in time and space.
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