Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as God, the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life hereafter. These things, he said, are properly not objects of knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense‐content to work with, and as the words “soul,” “God,” “immortality,” cover no distinctive sense‐content whatever, it follows that theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning _for our practice_. We can act _as if_ there were a God; feel _as if_ we were free; consider Nature _as if_ she were full of special designs; lay plans _as if_ we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. Our faith _that_ these unintelligible objects actually exist proves thus to be a full equivalent in _praktischer Hinsicht_, as Kant calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of _what_ they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive them. So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever. My object in thus recalling Kant’s doctrine to your mind is not to express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies. Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely aware through every fibre of its being.