Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/125

 Causality. He had besides already mentioned two false hypotheses in the seventh section of his "Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding," which recently have again been advanced : the one, that the effect of the will upon the members of our body; the other, that the resistance opposed to our pressure by outward objects, is the origin and prototype of the conception of Causality. Hume refutes both in his own way and according to his own order of ideas. I argue as follows. There is no causal connection whatever between acts of the will and actions of the body ; on the contrary, both are immediately one and the same thing, only perceived in a double aspect that is, on the one hand, in our self-consciousness, or inner sense, as acts of the will; on the other, simultaneously in exterior, spacial brain-perception, as actions of the body. The second hypothesis is false, first because, as I have already shown at length, a mere sensation of touch does not yet give any objective perception whatever, let alone the conception of Causality, which never can arise from the feeling of an impeded muscular effort : besides impediments of this kind often occur without any external cause; secondly, because our pressing against an external object necessarily has a motive, and this already presupposes apprehension of that object, which again presupposes knowledge of Causality. —But the only means of radically proving the conception of Causality to be independent of all experience was by showing, as I have done, that the whole possibility of experience is conditioned by the conception of Causality. In § 23 I intend to show that Kant's proof, propounded with a similar intent, is false.

This is also the proper place for drawing attention to the