Page:Immanuel Kant - Dreams of a Spirit-Seer - tr. Emanuel Fedor Goerwitz (1900).djvu/39

 Rh this negative or neutral ability of the reason. It can neither create a knowledge of the spiritual world, nor can it deny the possibility of such a world. It can affirm indeed the rationality of such a conception, but the reality of it does not come within its domain as pure reason. It is interesting to note all through Kant's "critical" period this forced attitude of neutrality as long as the inquiry is simply and solely as to the power of the reason as such to create a knowledge of things transcending experience. He is strictly and manfully consistent with himself in rejecting as conclusions of pure reason any experiences of an objective world experimentally observed, whether on this material plane of existence or any other. To refuse to deny the possibility of other planes of existence and other modes of knowing than we now experience, is as far as he will go. As for admitting the direct communication of "spirits," or of the seer himself whose system of the two worlds he has so carefully studied, as elements of purely rational knowledge, this was of course out of the queslion. The nearest approach to the break down of the barrier between Kant's "pure reason" and Swedenborg's knowledge ex visis et auditis in mundo spirituali, is in the Æslhetic with its doctrine of the subjective origin of Time and Space. Here of course Kant throws down all his defences against whatever charge of idealism or spiritualism. The question is no longer, can an "intelligible world" exist? or, are there existences other than that of which we become aware through the