Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/134

 116 it is rather far off, and which would seem the last thing to be expected of her — the companion of wisdom. As long as people think it still possible to attain knowledges about things so far off, wise simplicity may call out in vain that such great endeavours are unnecessary. The pleasure accompanying the extension of knowledge will easily make it appear a duty, and will consider deliberate and intentional contentedness to be foolish simplicity, opposed to the improvement of our nature. The questions about the spiritual nature, about freedom and predestination, the future state, &c., at first animate all the powers of reason, and through their excellency draw man into the rivalry of a speculation which reasons and decides, teaches and refutes without discrimination, just according to the nature of the apparent knowledge in each case. But if this investigation develop into philosophy which judges its own proceedings, and which knows not only objects, but their relation to man's reason, then the lines of demarcation are drawn closer, and the boundary stones are laid which in future never allow investigation to wander beyond its proper district. We had to make use of a good deal of philosophy to know the difficulties surrounding a conception generally treated as being very convenient and common. Still more philosophy moves this phantom of knowledge yet further away, and convinces us that it is entirely beyond the horizon of man. For in the relations of cause and effect, of substance and action, philosophy at first serves to dissolve the complicated phenomena, and to reduce