Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/171

 posited by the end. This indifference of things to each other does not express their true relation, but is merely an illusion. The true character of the relation is the teleological characterisation of conformity to an end, and it is in this, accordingly, that we have the absence of indifference in the relation between existing things. This expresses the essential relation, the relation which is valid and true. The Proof points to the necessity of having one supreme principle of order or regulating essence, for we infer from the unity of the world that the cause is one.

Kant, in opposition to this, says that this argument shows us God merely as an architect and not as a creator, and that it is concerned merely with the contingent elements of forms and not with the substance. It is, in fact, only the suitability of means to end which is demanded, the quality of objects in relation to each other in so far as it is posited by or depends for its existence on some Power. This quality, says Kant, is merely form, and the Power which posits would be a Cause producing forms merely, and not a Power creating matter. The distinction upon which this criticism rests has no meaning. There can be no positing of the form by the Power without the positing of the matter. If we have once got into the region of the Notion, we have got far past the distinction of form and matter, and must know that absolute form is something real, that therefore form is something, and that apart from matter it is nothing. When the word form is used in this connection it expresses a particular quality. The essential form, however, is the end, the Notion itself which realises itself; the form in the sense in which it is the Notion is the substantial element itself, the Soul; what can be distinguished from it as matter is something which is formal and entirely secondary, or it is merely a formal characterisation in the Notion.

Kant says further that the syllogism starts from the