Freedom (independence) from the laws of nature is no doubt a deliverance from restraint, but also from the guidance of all rules. We have, therefore, nothing but nature, in which we must try to find the connection and order of cosmical events.

It is therefore an empty fiction of the mind, and not to be met with in any experience. “There is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place entirely according to nature.Transcendental freedom is therefore opposed to the law of causality, and represents such a connection of successive states of effective causes, that no unity of experience is possible with it. It is therefore a question which deserves at least closer investigation and cannot be disposed of at first sight: Whether there is any knowledge independent of all experience and even of all impressions of the senses? Such knowledge is called 'a priori' and is distinguished from empirical knowledge, which has its source 'a posteriori', that is, in experience.” For it is quite possible that even our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we perceive through impressions, and of that which our own faculty of knowledge (incited by sense impressions) supplies from itself, a supplement which we do not distinguish from that raw material until long practice and rendered us capable of separating one from the other. For how should the faculty of knowledge be called into activity, if not by objects which affect our senses and which, on the one hand, produce representations by themselves or on the other, rouse the activity of our understanding to compare, connect, or separate them and thus to convert the raw material of our sensible impressions into knowledge of objects, which we call experience? With respect to time, therefore, no knowledge within us is antecedent to experience, but all knowledge begins with it.īut though all our knowledge begins with experience, is does not follow that it all arises from experience. “That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt.

The book critique of pure reason