I shall make this plainer. Guided by the principles involved in
these ideas, we must, in the first place, so connect all the
phenomena, actions, and feelings of the mind, as if it were a simple
substance, which, endowed with personal identity, possesses a
permanent existence (in this life at least), while its states, among
which those of the body are to be included as external conditions, are
in continual change. Secondly, in cosmology, we must investigate the
conditions of all natural phenomena, internal as well as external,
as if they belonged to a chain infinite and without any prime or
supreme member, while we do not, on this account, deny the existence
of intelligible grounds of these phenomena, although we never employ
them to explain phenomena, for the simple reason that they are not
objects of our cognition. Thirdly, in the sphere of theology, we
must regard the whole system of possible experience as forming an
absolute, but dependent and sensuously-conditioned unity, and at the
same time as based upon a sole, supreme, and all-sufficient ground
existing apart from the world itself- a ground which is a
self-subsistent, primeval and creative reason, in relation to which we
so employ our reason in the field of experience, as if all objects
drew their origin from that archetype of all reason.
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