, that the necessity of
nature, which cannot co-exist with the freedom of the subject,
appertains only to the attributes of the thing that is subject to
time-conditions, consequently only to those of the acting subject as a
phenomenon; that therefore in this respect the determining
principles of every action of the same reside in what belongs to
past time and is no longer in his power (in which must be included his
own past actions and the character that these may determine for him in
his own eyes as a phenomenon). But the very same subject, being on the
other side conscious of himself as a thing in himself, considers his
existence also in so far as it is not subject to time-conditions,
and regards himself as only determinable by laws which he gives
himself through reason; and in this his existence nothing is
antecedent to the determination of his will, but every action, and
in general every modification of his existence, varying according to
his internal sense, even the whole series of his existence as a
sensible being is in the consciousness of his supersensible
existence nothing but the result, and never to be regarded as the
determining principle, of his causality as a noumenon.
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