When these ideas of God, of an intelligible world (the kingdom of
God), and of immortality are further determined by predicates taken
from our own nature, we must not regard this determination as a
sensualizing of those pure rational ideas (anthropomorphism), nor as a
transcendent knowledge of supersensible objects; for these
predicates are no others than understanding and will, considered too
in the relation to each other in which they must be conceived in the
moral law, and therefore, only so far as a pure practical use is
made of them. As to all the rest that belongs to these conceptions
psychologically, that is, so far as we observe these faculties of ours
empirically in their exercise (e.g., that the understanding of man
is discursive, and its notions therefore not intuitions but
thoughts, that these follow one another in time, that his will has its
satisfaction always dependent on the existence of its object, etc.,
which cannot be the case in the Supreme Being), from all this we
abstract in that case, and then there remains of the notions by
which we conceive a pure intelligence nothing more than just what is
required for the possibility of conceiving a moral law. There is
then a knowledge of God indeed, but only for practical purposes,
and, if we attempt to extend it to a theoretical knowledge, we find an
understanding that has intuitions, not thoughts, a will that is
directed to objects on the existence of which its satisfaction does
not in the least depend (not to mention the transcendental predicates,
as, for example, a magnitude of existence, that is duration, which,
however, is not in time, the only possible means we have of conceiving
existence as magnitude). Now these are all attributes of which we
can form no conception that would help to the knowledge of the object,
and we learn from this that they can never be used for a theory of
supersensible beings, so that on this side they are quite incapable of
being the foundation of a speculative knowledge, and their use is
limited simply to the practice of the moral law.
{BOOK_2|CHAPTER_2 ^paragraph 75}