It is here the place to raze Hume’s doubt from its foundation. He maintained justly that we can in nowise discern through Reason the possibility of causation, namely, the reference of the existence of one thing to the existence of some other thing posited by the former. I may add to this, that we can just as little discern the conception of subsistence, i.e., the necessity contained therein, that a subject must lie at the basis of the existence of a thing, and itself be no predicate of any other thing. [I would say even] that we can form no conception of the possibility of such a thing (though we can point out examples of its use in experience). In the same way this inconceivability attaches even to the community of things, since it is not discernible how, from the state of one thing, a consequence can be drawn as to the state of some totally different thing, external to it, and vice versa; and how substances of which each has its own separate existence, are necessarily dependent on one another. At the same time, I am far from regarding these conceptions as merely bor- rowed from experience, and the necessity, that is presented in them, as fictitious and mere illusion, induced in us by long custom. I have, rather, sufficiently shown that both they and the axioms deduced from them, subsist aprioribefore all experience, and possess indubitable objective correctness, though unquestionably only in respect of experiences.
- 951 reads
