Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/23

] of an action presupposes a preceding state of inaction in the cause, and a dynamically first beginning of action presupposes a state or condition that has no causal relation with the preceding state of that cause and in no wise results from it. Transcendental freedom, therefore, is opposed to the law of causality, and it is such a combination of successive states or conditions of acting causes that no unity of experience is possible with it, and consequently it is not found in experience, and hence is an empty fiction of the mind."

The alternative here is either fixed laws of nature—everything predetermined necessarily—or transcendental freedom, which means, as he informs us further on, lawlessness, without the guidance of rules. But the thesis had not rested on the question of preference for law or lawlessness, but on a deeper necessity underlying the principle of causality itself, namely, the necessity that an adequate (and not a confessedly incomplete) cause should be posited as existing for each effect. If it shall be found that an adequate cause is necessarily a personal cause, and hence one not under necessity but under freedom, then we must accept the causality of freedom or else deny causality altogether.

This will appear, if we recall the thesis, which showed the following points:

III. Solution of the Antinomy.—I) The series of phenomena in nature do not originate new determinations; they are not true causes, but they merely transmit causality.

2) Hence, unless the whole series receives causality from a "transcendental freedom" (or from a cause that originates new determinations), there is only an effect and no cause.

3) But an effect without a cause is no effect. Herewith the entire series falls asunder into independent members, and each member becomes a causa sui. For if the change in each member of the series is not derived from a true cause outside it is self-originated.

4) Hence, too, the conformity to law which is admired in nature would vanish unless there exists a transcendental freedom.