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On the whole the result has been not to elevate politics, but to lower the courts toward the political level, a result which conforms to the a priori theory. The abstract virtue of the written Constitution was not, however, a question in issue when Washington and his contemporaries set themselves to reorganize the Confederation.
In pure a priori judgements this must be done by means of transcendental reflection, whereby, as has been already shown, each representation has its place appointed in the corresponding faculty of cognition, and consequently the influence of the one faculty upon the other is made apparent.
So much I know by an a priori argument, and could wish, therefore, that it had been scientifically important to know it as important, for instance, as to know the occultation of a star, or the transit of Venus to a second.
Consequently, from an examination of the former, we could not determine a priori, that they must be followed by the latter, or by any other result whatever. Our knowledge here, if knowledge it can be called, is wholly empirical, or founded on experience. As we have seen, it is absurd to say, that one atom of matter literally acts on another.
But of this decidedly synthetical proposition, I nowhere meet with even an attempt at proof; nay, it very rarely has the good fortune to stand, as it deserves to do, at the head of the pure and entirely a priori laws of nature. In truth, the statement that substance is permanent, is tautological.
The advocates of the a priori theory are obliged to have recourse to other arguments. These are reducible to two, which I shall endeavor to state as clearly and as forcibly as possible.
This principle is not based merely upon that of contradiction; for, in addition to the relation between two contradictory predicates, it regards everything as standing in a relation to the sum of possibilities, as the sum total of all predicates of things, and, while presupposing this sum as an a priori condition, presents to the mind everything as receiving the possibility of its individual existence from the relation it bears to, and the share it possesses in, the aforesaid sum of possibilities.* The principle of complete determination relates the content and not to the logical form.
And then, again, in the present day, has not the designation of an 'hypnotical subject' become almost a social position? To be fed, to be paid, admired, exhibited in public, run after, and all the rest of it all this is enough to make the most impartial looker-on skeptical. But is it enough to enable us to produce an a priori negation?
Whatever be the content of our conception of an object, it is necessary to go beyond it, if we wish to predicate existence of the object. In the case of sensuous objects, this is attained by their connection according to empirical laws with some one of my perceptions; but there is no means of cognizing the existence of objects of pure thought, because it must be cognized completely a priori.
This action of the gods both for good and evil became in its turn the rule of life for the ignorant multitude, and they acted in conformity with the supposed will and actions of the gods; the divine will was, however, nothing but an a priori religious conception of an idol representing the forces of nature or some moral or religious idea.
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