[Footnote 3: See _The Critique of Pure Reason_ (Mueller, tr.), pp. 575
ff.]
[Footnote 4: _Harvard Theo. Rev._, vol. I, no. 1, p. 16.]
Kant is more than once profoundly inconsistent with the extreme
subjectivism of his theory of ideas as when he says in the _Practical
Reason_: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing
admiration and awe the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on
them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within."[5] Again he
remarks, "The belief in a great and wise Author of the world has been
supported entirely by the wonderful beauty, order and providence,
everywhere displayed in nature."[6] Here the objective reality both of
what is presented to our senses and what is conceived of in the mind,
is, as though unconsciously, taken for granted. Thus while he contends
for a practical theism, the very basis of his interest still rests in
the conviction of a Being external to us and existing independent of
our thought.
[Footnote 5: _The Critique of Practical Reason_ (tr. T.K. Abbott), p.
260.]
[Footnote 6: _The Critique of Pure Reason_, p. 702.]
But his intention of making right conduct the essence of religion
is typical of the limits of humanistic interests and perceptions. In
making his division of reason into the theoretical and the practical,
it is to the latter realm that he assigns morality and religion.
Clearly this is genuine rationalism. I am not forgetting Kant's great
religious contribution. He was the son of devout German pietists and
saturated in the literature of the Old Testament. It is to Amos, who
may justly be called his spiritual father, that he owes the moral
absoluteness of his categorical imperative, the reading of history
as a moral order. He was following Amos when he took God out of the
physical and put Him into the moral sphere and interpreted Him in
the terms of purpose. But the doctrine of _The Critique of Practical
Reason_ is intended to negate those transcendent elements generally
believed to be the distinctive portions of religion. God is not known
to us as an objective being, an entity without ourselves. He is an
idea, a belief, which gives meaning to our ethical life, a subjective
necessity. He is a postulate of the moral will. To quote Professor
McGiffert again: "We do not get God from the universe, we give Him
to the universe. We read significance and moral purpose into it. We
assume God, not to account for the world, but for the subjective
need of realizing our highest good.... Religion becomes a creative
act of the moral will just as knowledge is a creative act of the
understanding."[7] Thus there are no ultimate values; at least we can
know nothing of them; we have nothing to look to which is objective
and changeless. The absolutism of the Categorical Imperative is
a subjective one, bounded by ourselves, formed of our substance.
Religion is not discovered, but self-created, a sort of sublime
expediency. It can carry, then, no confident assertion as to the
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