Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/132

 consequence of this, its restriction to possible experience, Nevertheless, I cannot assent to the proof there given of the a priority of the principle, which is substantially this:—"The synthesis of the manifold by the imagination, which is necessary for all empirical knowledge, gives succession, but not yet determinate succession : that is, it leaves undetermined which of two states perceived was the first, not only in my imagination, but in the object itself. But definite order in this succession—through which alone what we perceive becomes experience, or, in other words, authorizes us to form objectively valid judgments—is first brought into it by the purely intellectual conception of cause and effect. Thus the principle of causal relation is the condition which renders experience possible, and, as such, it is given us a priori."

According to this, the order in which changes succeed each other in real objects becomes known to us as objective only by their causality. This assertion Kant repeats and explains in the "Critique of Pure Reason," especially in his "Second Analogy of Experience," and again at the conclusion of his "Third Analogy," and I request every one who desires to understand what I am now about to say, to read these passages. In them he affirms every where that the objectivity of the succession of representations—which he defines as their correspondence with the succession of real objects—is only known through the rule by which they follow upon one another: that is, through the law of causality ; that my mere apprehension consequently leaves the objective relation between phenomena following one another quite undetermined : since