Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/33

 Rh the acceptance of this 'soul-vision' stands in manifest connection with the 'philosophic invention' of a mundus intelligibilis with its 'spiritual' constitution. The spiritual world is visible only to the spiritual sight. Man does not possess this; only God does. But that man may come to possess this vision which is for a time denied him, Kant does not deny. Indeed, the immortality of man consists in just this possession, in the change from the sensuous spatial vision into the timeless and spaceless spiritual vision: and this is itself 'the other world.' The other world is therefore not another place, but only another view of even this world. This hypothesis appears in the 'Dreams;' also in the period between 1770 and 1780 in the 'Lectures on Metaphysics,' p. 225; and even in the Critique of Pure Reason, A. 393; especially in the Methodenslehre, A. 779, where Kant admits of our accepting such a 'transcendental hypothesis," yea, approves of it. He proposes, indeed, in the same line of thought, the following hypothesis: 'That this life is nothing more than the mere appearance, i.e., the sensuous semblance of the pure spiritual life, and the whole sense world is but a picture which hovers before our present modes of knowing, and, like a dream, has no reality in itself; and that, if we should know and see things and ourselves as they really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures.' That 'world of spiritual natures' constitutes then that timeless 'corpus mysticum of rational beings' (A. 808, B. 836). Of this corpus mysticum Kant