We have seen that Kant represents the use of legal terms as essential
to the subject, and that he keeps to them from beginning to end; let
it now be noted how he employs the same style for the following finely
devised sophism. He says: "That a person accused by his conscience
should be identified with the judge is an absurd way of portraying a
court of justice; for in that case the accuser would invariably lose."
And he adds, by way of elucidating this statement, a very ambiguous
and obscure note. His conclusion is that, if we would avoid falling
into a contradiction, we must think of the judge (in the judicial
conscience-drama that is enacted in our breasts) as different from us,
in fact, as another person; nay more, as one that is an omniscient
knower of hearts, whose hests are obligatory on all, and who is
almighty for every purpose of executive authority.[6] He thus passes by
a perfectly smooth path from conscience to superstition, making the
latter a necessary consequence of the former; while he is secretly sure
that he will be all the more willingly followed because the reader's
earliest training will have certainly rendered him familiar with such
ideas, if not have made them his second nature. Here, then, Kant finds
an easy task,--a thing he ought rather to have despised; for he
should have concerned himself not only with preaching, but also with
practising truthfulness. I entirely reject the above quoted sentence,
and all the conclusions consequent thereon, and I declare it to be
nothing but a shuffling trick. It is =not true= that the accuser
must always lose, when the accused is the same person as the judge;
at least not in the court of judgment in our hearts. In the instance
I gave of one man going surety for another, did the accuser lose? Or
must we in this case also, if we wish to avoid a contradiction, really
assume a personification after Kant's fashion, and be driven to view
objectively as =another person= that voice whose deliverance would
have been those terrible words: "A fool's piece of work!"? A sort of
Mercury, forsooth, in living flesh? Or perhaps a prosopopoeia of the
_Μῆτις_ (cunning) recommended by Homer (_Il._ xxiii. 313 sqq.)?[7]
But thus we should only be landed, as before, on the broad path of
superstition, aye, and pagan superstition too.
It is in this passage that Kant indicates his Moral Theology, briefly
indeed, yet not without all its vital points. The fact that he takes
care, not to attribute to it any objective validity, but rather to
present it merely as a form subjectively unavoidable, does not free him
from the arbitrariness with which he constructs it, even though he only
claims its necessity for human consciousness. His fabric rests, as we
have seen, on a tissue of baseless assumptions.