outside causes, and hence Kant is correct in affirming that experience in this field must find every event conditioned by another event, ad infinitum. Moreover, such search for a mechanical cause is and must be forever futile, because no mechanism can originate a new determination in anything else. This is, of course, implied in Kant's statement that the regressive series of causes, or rather links of transmittal, is infinite.
10) But it is singular that Kant did not call attention to the appearance of the second phase, that of internal observation, as a factor of actual experience. He must have admitted that this factor is constantly borrowed to interpret the phenomena of the outer world. Within ourselves we are conscious of originating determinations in the acts of thinking and feeling, and especially of willing. These determinations presuppose "a preceding state of inaction in their cause," that is to say, they are not mechanically caused by previous events, but are originated by the self-activity of the ego. Now, as far as mechanical causes go, we do not seek, nor does the "unity of experience" ever prompt us to seek, for a thing or event that constrains an idea or volition. We rest contented when we have discovered a living being as the cause, and at once transfer our inquiry from the realm of efficient causes to that of final causes or motives. A motive exists only for a self-determined being or living being. By a stretch of meaning, we may regard action from motives, or teleological action, as common to all living beings—conscious motives in men and some animals, unconscious in other animals, except in the dim form of desire, unconscious in plants, but guiding only as life-principle or instinct.
11) We observe in the external world only forms of matter and motion, merely mechanical things and events. But to certain of these things we add, by inference from analogy with our inward experience, the concept of life or soul, and call such things endowed with soul, organisms—say, plants, animals, men. These objects are acknowledged to be a part of our experience, but it is clear that objects to which we attribute
