Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/161

 3. Kant aimed to establish the pure autonomy and spontaneity of the moral sense, and especially as independent of all theological presuppositions. But he was nevertheless convinced that religion and morality are vitally related. He finds the transition from morality to religion to rest on the fact that man is destined to realize the unconditional moral law in the empirical world, i. e. in the world of finitude, limitation and conditionality. Ideal and reality here appear in sharp contrast to each other, which gives rise to a demand for harmony between liberty and nature, virtue and happiness, and it is just because experience offers no guarantee, that religious postulates, which contain the conditions of such a harmony, are formulated. Besides the freedom of the will previously cited, there are according to Kant two additional postulates: viz. the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. Kant is convinced that these postulates reveal a universal human need. Faith is the natural consequence of the sentiment of morality, even though faith is not a duty.

The possibility of faith rests upon the fact that knowledge is limited to phenomena. The native element of the dogmas of faith is the thing-in-itself. But these dogmas add nothing to our knowledge. This follows even from the fact that our intellectual and intuitional forms do not pertain to the thing-in-itself. Religious ideas are nothing more than analogies or figures of speech. Kant even goes so far as to say that if the anthropomorphisms are carefully discarded from the psychological attributes ascribed to God, nothing remains but the empty word.

This fact, which even applies to the ideas of natural religion, is still mere pertinent to the ideas of positive religion. In his treatise on Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der