Man would be a marionette
or an automaton, like Vaucanson's, prepared and wound up by the
Supreme Artist. Self-consciousness would indeed make him a thinking
automaton; but the consciousness of his own spontaneity would be
mere delusion if this were mistaken for freedom, and it would
deserve this name only in a comparative sense, since, although the
proximate determining causes of its motion and a long series of
their determining causes are internal, yet the last and highest is
found in a foreign hand. Therefore I do not see how those who still
insist on regarding time and space as attributes belonging to the
existence of things in themselves, can avoid admitting the fatality of
actions; or if (like the otherwise acute Mendelssohn) they allow
them to be conditions necessarily belonging to the existence of finite
and derived beings, but not to that of the infinite Supreme Being, I
do not see on what ground they can justify such a distinction, or,
indeed, how they can avoid the contradiction that meets them, when
they hold that existence in time is an attribute necessarily belonging
to finite things in themselves, whereas God is the cause of this
existence, but cannot be the cause of time (or space) itself (since
this must be presupposed as a necessary a priori condition of the
existence of things); and consequently as regards the existence of
these things.
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