The noumenon of freedom is an incentive to man urging him to act as if he were capable of practicing the law of universality and necessity. In fact the phrase “as if” plays a leading rôle in the Kantian philosophy. The noumenon of God, as will presently be shown, is afflicted with this conditional “as if” character to even a higher degree. We are to assume God in order to look upon the vast field of possible experience as if it were unified, as if a being who himself stands for unity had been its creator. This assumption is supposed to be necessary in order to encourage the scientist in his search for the thread of unity, lest he flag by the way. As a matter of fact scientists have contented themselves with the simple assumption of the uniformity of nature as necessary to the prosecution of their investigations, and have as a rule troubled themselves little to hypostasize the notion of unity. Nor has recent progress in science been associated with and influenced by the belief in an individual Deity. The noumenon of God is unnecessary for science while in Kant’s ethical application of it it is positively harmful. He introduces the God notion as an artificial device for linking together happiness and virtue, a device quite inconsistent with the noble austerity of his ethical system, whatever its other defects may be. The noumena, then, are apparitions that appear at the end of certain paths in the field of experience, far off where the sky and the ground seem to meet. These paths run off in different directions. At the end of each is one of these limiting apparitions, and the society of noumena is disconnected internally: there is no relation of unity between the unifiers. [35] The difference between “supersensible” and “supernatural” is capital. I do not encourage relapse into supernaturalism. The supernatural is the opposite of the supersensible. It is an attempt to represent in natural or _sensible_ guise what is supposed to be beyond the senses; and the naturalistic representation of the supersensible is then taken not metaphorically but literally. [36] He allows indeed the _Ens Realissimum_ to remain, and calls it the ideal of the reason, the ideal of unity hypostasized, centralized in an individual, and somehow harboring within itself all real properties whatsoever. But it is quite impossible to conceive how all real properties can belong to a single individual. For the properties as we know them are incompatible with each other. Surely an individual cannot be both great and small, beautiful and ugly, of all colors and sounds, etc., etc. Or again if all properties were somehow assembled in one individual, since that individual is conceived of as an hypostasized unity, it would be impossible to speak of a relation between them, and yet upon the relation of the differentiæ depends the ethical utility of the idea of a supreme reality.