Its aims, according to Prof. _Jodl_, one of its noted champions, are: “Promotion of moral life, fostering of a refined humanity, development of a true fellow-feeling, without the religious and metaphysical notions upon which mankind hitherto has mostly built its ethical ideals.” _Kant_ was the pioneer here: “In so far as morality is based on the conception of man as a free, being, it requires neither the idea of a superior being to make him cognizant of his duties, nor any motive but the law itself in order to observe it ... hence morality for its own sake does not by any means need religion.” This is the viewpoint of the autonomous man, who is his own law. “From the viewpoint of authority,” so tells us _E. von Hartmann_, “autonomy does not mean anything else but that in ethical matters I am for myself the highest court without appeal.... The God, Who in the beginning spoke to His children from a fiery cloud ... has descended into our bosom, and, transformed into our own being, speaks out of us as a moral autonomy.” _Diis extinctis successit humanitas._ “Although an individual representative of science may be a believer in God in his private life,” so argues the English philosopher, _W. James_, “at any rate the times have passed when it could be said that the heavens announce to science the glory of God, and that the heaven shows the works of His hands.” The flight from divinity, atheism open or disguised, is the psychological effect of the liberal principle. Free thought aims to free man of all authority, it aims at severing from religion his entire existence, marriage, state, schools, and likewise science. “It is undeniable,” we hear from the lips of champions of modern man, standing on the pinnacle of religious liberalism, “that there is a certain forsakenness in this existence of man, as compared to a life brightened by the idea of a God,” but that forsakenness is not purchased too dearly, for “it is the solitude of autonomy, a possession so precious that no price for it could be too high” (_Carneri_). Indeed, these modern men use even plainer language: science is applauded for having at last freed man from God. With _Kant’s_ principle that we cannot know anything of the supernatural, we are told, there “were thrown overboard the cosmogonic notions of the Semitic races, notions that have so severely oppressed our science and religion, and are still oppressing them.... By this insight an idol is smashed. In a previous chapter I called the Israelites the worshippers of abstract idols; now, I believe, I shall be fully understood.” Indeed, we understand. It means: Away with God. “This German metaphysics frees us from idolatry and reveals to us the living divinity in our own bosom” (_Chamberlain_).