It might seem, at first sight, as though in morals and religion rationalism were the only possible method to be approved by philosophy, for, inasmuch as morals are concerned with what ought to be, not with what is, they cannot depend on observation, but must be deduced from some principle above experience; nor are objects of religion, God and the soul, objects of observation. No man can "by searching find out God." It was natural, therefore, that both on the Continent and in England morality and religion began by being rationalistic. Descartes believed that his mathematical method could be applied with success to demonstrate the truths of religion, while Locke includes morality along with mathematics among the a priori and certain sciences. But the history of eighteenth century controversy showed that, in spite of rationalist methods, neither morality nor religion could attain that certainty and general agreement which marked the mathematical sciences. Spinoza, applying the same method as Descartes, but with more consistency, arrived at a conception of God which most of his contemporaries regarded as "horrid atheism," and the general result of rational theology is well described by one of Kant’s correspondents when he says that the more proofs of the existence of God he learnt, the more his doubts increased. In England the attempts made to found morality upon rationalist principles produced systems too barren to withstand the attack of empiricism fortified by the growing interest in history and anthropology. The Deist movement, an attempt to free religion from the incrustations of faith and deduce it from pure reason, showed that a religion founded on pure reason contained nothing worth believing. In Hume we have the final discrediting of reason in these spheres. He shows ingeniously that "the good Berkeley’s" argument for the existence of God could be turned round to disprove the existence of the soul, and he concluded that religion was a sphere with which reason had no concern. In the sphere of morals the distinction between what ought to be and what is, the distinction on which rationalistic morals are based, had been discredited by a reduction of all conduct to Utilitarianism, a search for pleasure and a flight from pain mediated by sympathy. The consequences are described by Kant in his preface to the _Critique of Pure Reason_: "At present, after everything has been tried, so they say, and tried in vain, there reign in philosophy weariness and complete indifferentism, the mother of chaos and night in all sciences," though he hopefully continues, "but at the same time the source, or at least the prelude, of their near reform and of a new light, after an ill-applied study has rendered them dark, confused, and useless."