Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/139

 two states : that is, of a change ; and even the fact that we are able to conceive the necessity of a succession at all, proves already that the causal law is not known to us empirically, but given us a priori. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is the general expression for the fundamental form of the necessary connection between all our objects, i.e. representations, which lies in the innermost depths of our cognitive faculty : it is the form common to all representations, and the only source of the conception of necessity, which contains absolutely nothing else in it and no other import, than that of the following of the consequence, when its reason has been established. Now, the reason why this principle determines the order of succession in Time in the class of representations we are now investigating, in which it figures as the law of causality, is, that Time is the form of these representations, therefore the necessary connection appears here as the rule of succession. In other forms of the principle of sufficient reason, the necessary connection it always demands will appear under quite different forms from that of Time, therefore not as succession ; still it always retains the character of a necessary connection, by which the identity of the principle under all its forms, or rather the unity of the root of all the laws of which that principle is the common expression, reveals itself.

If Kant's assertion were correct, which I dispute, our only way of knowing the reality of succession would be through its necessity; but this would presuppose an Understanding that embraced all the series of causes and effects at once, consequently an omniscient Understanding. Kant has burdened the Understanding with an impossibility, merely in order to have less need of Sensibility.

How can we reconcile Kant's assertion that our only means of knowing the objective reality of succession is by