Without this
freedom (in the latter and true sense), which alone is practical a
priori, no moral law and no moral imputation are possible. just for
this reason the necessity of events in time, according to the physical
law of causality, may be called the mechanism of nature, although we
do not mean by this that things which are subject to it must be really
material machines. We look here only to the necessity of the
connection of events in a time-series as it is developed according
to the physical law, whether the subject in which this development
takes place is called automaton materiale when the mechanical being is
moved by matter, or with Leibnitz spirituale when it is impelled by
ideas; and if the freedom of our will were no other than the latter
(say the psychological and comparative, not also transcendental,
that is, absolute), then it would at bottom be nothing better than the
freedom of a turnspit, which, when once it is wound up, accomplishes
its motions of itself.
Now, in order to remove in the supposed case the apparent
contradiction between freedom and the mechanism of nature in one and
the same action, we must remember what was said in the Critique of
Pure Reason, or what follows therefrom; viz.
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