The Critique of Practical Reason — Kant — John Shaqi
The Critique of Practical Reason
Kant · en
This last is so obvious, and can be proved so clearly by fact,
that we may confidently challenge all pretended natural theologians (a
singular name) * to specify (over and above the merely ontological
predicates) one single attribute, whether of the understanding or of
the will, determining this object of theirs, of which we could not
show incontrovertibly that, if we abstract from it everything
anthropomorphic, nothing would remain to us but the mere word, without
our being able to connect with it the smallest notion by which we
could hope for an extension of theoretical knowledge. But as to the
practical, there still remains to us of the attributes of
understanding and will the conception of a relation to which objective
reality is given by the practical law (which determines a priori
precisely this relation of the understanding to the will). When once
this is done, then reality is given to the conception of the object of
a will morally determined (the conception of the summum bonum), and
with it to the conditions of its possibility, the ideas of God,
freedom, and immortality, but always only relatively to the practice
of the moral law (and not for any speculative purpose).
* Learning is properly only the whole content of the historical
sciences. Consequently it is only the teacher of revealed theology
that can be called a learned theologian. If, however, we choose to
call a man learned who is in possession of the rational sciences
(mathematics and philosophy), although even this would be contrary
to the signification of the word (which always counts as learning only
that which one must be "learned" and which, therefore, he cannot
discover of himself by reason), even in that case the philosopher
would make too poor a figure with his knowledge of God as a positive
science to let himself be called on that account a learned man.