This sensuous object must, in the second place, possess an
intelligible character, which guarantees it to be the cause of those
actions, as phenomena, although it is not itself a phenomenon nor
subordinate to the conditions of the world of sense. The former may be
termed the character of the thing as a phenomenon, the latter the
character of the thing as a thing in itself.
Now this active subject would, in its character of intelligible
subject, be subordinate to no conditions of time, for time is only a
condition of phenomena, and not of things in themselves. No action
would begin or cease to be in this subject; it would consequently be
free from the law of all determination of time- the law of change,
namely, that everything which happens must have a cause in the
phenomena of a preceding state. In one word, the causality of the
subject, in so far as it is intelligible, would not form part of the
series of empirical conditions which determine and necessitate an
event in the world of sense. Again, this intelligible character of a
thing cannot be immediately cognized, because we can perceive
nothing but phenomena, but it must be capable of being cogitated in
harmony with the empirical character; for we always find ourselves
compelled to place, in thought, a transcendental object at the basis
of phenomena although we can never know what this object is in itself.
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