But the right, say rather the necessity to admit a future life, upon
principles of the practical conjoined with the speculative use of
reason, has lost nothing by this renunciation; for the merely
speculative proof has never had any influence upon the common reason of
men. It stands upon the point of a hair, so that even the schools have
been able to preserve it from falling only by incessantly discussing it
and spinning it like a top; and even in their eyes it has never been
able to present any safe foundation for the erection of a theory. The
proofs which have been current among men, preserve their value
undiminished; nay, rather gain in clearness and unsophisticated power,
by the rejection of the dogmatical assumptions of speculative reason.
For reason is thus confined within her own peculiar province—the
arrangement of ends or aims, which is at the same time the arrangement
of nature; and, as a practical faculty, without limiting itself to the
latter, it is justified in extending the former, and with it our own
existence, beyond the boundaries of experience and life. If we turn our
attention to the analogy of the nature of living beings in this world,
in the consideration of which reason is obliged to accept as a
principle that no organ, no faculty, no appetite is useless, and that
nothing is superfluous, nothing disproportionate to its use, nothing
unsuited to its end; but that, on the contrary, everything is perfectly
conformed to its destination in life—we shall find that man, who alone
is the final end and aim of this order, is still the only animal that
seems to be excepted from it. For his natural gifts—not merely as
regards the talents and motives that may incite him to employ them, but
especially the moral law in him—stretch so far beyond all mere earthly
utility and advantage, that he feels himself bound to prize the mere
consciousness of probity, apart from all advantageous consequences—even
the shadowy gift of posthumous fame—above everything; and he is
conscious of an inward call to constitute himself, by his conduct in
this world—without regard to mere sublunary interests—the citizen of a
better. This mighty, irresistible proof—accompanied by an
ever-increasing knowledge of the conformability to a purpose in
everything we see around us, by the conviction of the boundless
immensity of creation, by the consciousness of a certain
illimitableness in the possible extension of our knowledge, and by a
desire commensurate therewith—remains to humanity, even after the
theoretical cognition of ourselves has failed to establish the
necessity of an existence after death.
Conclusion of the Solution of the Psychological Paralogism.