Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/120

 102 as a new revelation under the title of "Arcana Cœlestia," and applies therein his visions mostly to the discovery of the hidden sense in the first books of Moses, and to a similiar mode of explanation of the whole of Scripture. All these fantastic interpretations do not concern me here, but, whoever desires it, may look up Dr. Ernesti's Theological Library, volume first, for some information about them. Only the "audita and visa," i.e., what he professes to have seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, we will extract, principally from the appendices to his chapters, because they are the foundation of all the other fancies, and are also pretty well in the same line with the adventure which, in the foregoing, we have undertaken in the balloon of metaphysics. The author's style is plain. His stories and their arrangement seem really to be based upon fanatic observation, and afford little reason to suspect that fancies of a wrongly speculating reason have moved him to invent them, and use them for deception. In so far they are of some importance, and are really more deserving of being presented in a condensed form than many a plaything of brainless reasoners which swells our quarterlies. For a systematic delusion of the senses is a much more remarkable phenomenon than the deception of reason, the causes of which are well enough known, and which mostly could be prevented by an effort to guide the powers of mind, and to restrain somewhat an empty inquisitiveness. The delusion of the senses, on the other hand, concerns the first foundation of all judgments,