Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/135

Rh them to simpler conceptions. But when one has, finally, arrived at fundamental relations, philosophy has no business any more. Questions like "How something can be a cause, or possess power," can never be decided by reason; but these relations must be taken from experience alone. For the rules of our reason are applicable only to comparison in respect to identity or contrast. But in the case of a cause something is assumed to have come from something else; one can find therefore no connection in regard to identity. In the same way, if this effect is not already implied in what preceded, a contrast can never be made out; because it is not contradictory to merely assume one thing and abolish another. Thence the fundamental conceptions of causes, of forces, and of actions, if they are not taken from experience, are entirely arbitrary, and can be neither proved nor disproved. : : I know that will and understanding move my body, but I can never reduce by analysis this phenomenon, as a simple experience, to another experience, and can, therefore, indeed recognize it, but not understand it. That my will moves my arm is not more intelligible to me than if somebody said to me that he could stop the moon in his orbit. The difference is only that the one I experience, but that the latter has never occurred to me. I recognize in myself changes as of a living subject, namely, thoughts, power to choose, &c., &c., and, as these terms indicate things different in kind from any of those which, taken together, make up