PROLEGOMENA TOANYFUTUREMETAPHYSICS 829
What I adduce here is merely meant as an example to make the thing intelligible
and does not necessarily belong to our problem, which must be decided from mere con-
cepts independently of the properties which we meet in the actual world.
Now I may say without contradiction that all the actions of rational beings, so far as
they are appearances (met with in any experience), are subject to the necessity of nature,
but the very same actions, as regards merely the rational subject and its faculty of acting
according to mere reason, are free. For what is required for the necessity of nature?
Nothing more than the determinability of every event in the world of sense according to
constant laws, that is, a reference to cause in the [world of] appearance; in this process the
thing in itself at its foundation and its causality remain unknown. But, I say, the law of
nature remains, whether the rational being is the cause of the effects in the sensuous world
from reason—that is, through freedom—or whether it does not determine them on grounds
of reason. For if the former is the case, the action is performed according to maxims, the
effect of which as appearance is always conformable to constant laws; if the latter is the
case, and the action not performed on principles of reason, it is subjected to the empirical
laws of the sensibility, and in both cases the effects are connected according to constant
laws; more than this we do not require or know concerning natural necessity. But in the
former case reason is the cause of these laws of nature, and therefore free; in the latter, the
effects follow according to mere natural laws of sensibility, because reason does not influ-
ence it. But reason itself is not determined on that account by the sensibility (which is
impossible) and is therefore free in this case too. Freedom is therefore no hindrance to
natural law in appearances; neither does this law abrogate the freedom of the practical use
of reason, which is connected with things in themselves, as determining grounds.
Thus practical freedom, namely, the freedom in which reason possesses causality
according to objectively determining grounds, is rescued; and yet natural necessity is
not in the least curtailed with regard to the very same effects, as appearances. The same
remarks will serve to explain what we had to say concerning transcendental freedom
and its compatibility with natural necessity in the same subject, but not taken in the
same context. For, as to this, every beginning of the action of a being from objective
causes regarded as determining grounds is always a first beginning,though the same
action is in the series of appearances only a subordinate beginning,which must be pre-
ceded by a state of the cause which determines it and is itself determined in the same
manner by another immediately preceding. Thus we are able, in rational beings, or in
beings generally so far as their causality is determined in them as things in themselves,
to think of a faculty of beginning from themselves a series of states without falling into
contradiction with the laws of nature. For the relation of the action to objective grounds
of reason is not a time relation; in this case that which determines the causality does not
precede in time the action, because such determining grounds represent, not a reference
to objects of sense, for example, to causes in the appearances, but to determining causes
as things in themselves, which do not fall under conditions of time. And in this way the
action, with regard to the causality of reason, can be considered as a first beginning,
while in respect to the series of appearances as merely a subordinate beginning. We may
therefore without contradiction consider it in the former aspect as free, but in the latter
(as it is merely appearance) as subject to natural necessity.
As to the fourth antinomy, it is solved in the same way as the conflict of reason with
itself in the third. For, provided the cause inthe appearance is distinguished from the
cause ofthe appearances (so far as it can be thought as a thing in itself), both propositions
are perfectly reconcilable: the one, that there is nowhere in the sensuous world a cause
(according to similar laws of causality) whose existence is absolutely necessary; the other,
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