Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/81

 by combustion, volatilisation, or indeed any process whatever — we all nevertheless firmly assume that its substance, i.e. its matter, must still exist somewhere or other in undiminished quantity, whatever may have become of its form; likewise, when we perceive a body suddenly in a place where it was not before, that it must have been brought there or formed by some combination of invisible particles — for instance, by precipitation — but that it, i.e. its substance, cannot have then started into existence; for this implies a total impossibility and is utterly inconceivable. The certainty with which we assume this before hand (à priori), proceeds from the fact, that our Understanding possesses absolutely no form under which to conceive the beginning and end of Matter. For, as before said, the law of causality — the only form in which we are able to conceive changes at all — is solely applicable to states of bodies, and never under any circumstances to the existence of that which undergoes all changes: Matter. This is why I place the principle of the permanence of Matter among the corollaries of the causal law. Moreover, we cannot have acquired à posteriori the conviction that substance is permanent, partly because it cannot, in most instances, be empirically established; partly also, because every empirical knowledge obtained exclusively by means of induction, has only approximate, consequently precarious, never unconditioned, certainty. The firmness of our persuasion as to this principle is therefore of a different kind and nature from our security of conviction with regard to the accuracy of any empirically discovered law of Nature, since it has an entirely different, perfectly unshakable, never vacillating firmness. The reason of this is, that the principle expresses a transcendental knowledge, i.e. one which determines and fixes, prior to all experience, what is in any way possible within the whole range of experience; but, precisely by this, it reduces the world of experience to a mere