Kant’s central idea is that truth, beauty, goodness, are not dependent on
some qualities of the object, but on the universal nature or law of
consciousness. Beauty is not an attribute of things in their abstractness:
but of things as ideas of a subject, and depends on the proportion and
symmetry in the play of human faculty. Goodness is not conformity to an
outward law, but is obligatory on us through that higher nature which is
our truer being. Truth is not conformity of ideas with supposed
trans-subjective things, but coherence and stability in the system of
ideas. The really infinite world is not out there, but in here—in
consciousness in general, which is the denial of all limitation, of all
finality, of all isolation. God is the essential and inherent unity and
unifier of spirit and nature—the surety that the world in all its
differentiations is one. The Soul is not an essential entity, but the
infinite fruitfulness and freshness of mental life, which forbids us
stopping at anything short of complete continuity and unity. The Kingdom
of God—the Soul—the moral law—is within us: within us, as supreme,
supra-personal and infinite intelligences, even amid all our littleness
and finitude. Even happiness which we stretch our arms after is not really
beyond us, but is the essential self which indeed we can only reach in
detail. It is so both in knowledge and in action. Each knowledge and
enjoyment in reality is limited and partial, but it is made stable, and it
gets a touch of infinitude, by the larger idea which it helps to realise.
Only indeed in that antithesis between the finite and the infinite does
the real live. Every piece of knowledge is real, only because it assumes
_pro tempore_ certain premisses which are given: every actual beauty is
set in some defect of aesthetic completeness: every actually good deed has
to get its foil in surrounding badness. The real is always partial and
incomplete. But it has the basis or condition of its reality in an idea—in
a transcendental unity of consciousness, which is so to say a law, or a
system and an order, which imposes upon it the condition of conformity and
coherence; but a conformity which is essential and implicit in it.