Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/251

 evade the demand referred to, and if all the while reason be held to be so entirely repressed that it no longer attaches any weight to this proof. But just as it may appear to be a sin against the good society of the philosophers of our time to continue to mention those proofs, it equally appears that the philosophy of Kant, and Kant’s refutations of those proofs, are something which we have long ago done with, and which is therefore not to be mentioned any more.

The fact, however, is that it is Kant’s criticism alone which has done away with these proofs in a scientific way, and which has itself become the source of the other and shorter method of rejecting them, that method, namely, which makes feeling alone the judge of truth, and asserts not only that thought is superfluous, but that it is damnable. In so far, then, as we are concerned in getting to know the scientific reasons for which these proofs have lost their authority, it is Kant’s criticism alone with which we are called to deal. It is, however, to be noticed, further, that the ordinary proofs which Kant subjects to criticism, and in particular the Cosmological and Physico-theological Proofs, whose method we are here considering, contain characteristics of a more concrete kind than the abstract merely qualitative characteristics of finitude and infinitude. Thus the Cosmological Proof contains the characteristics of contingent existence and of absolutely necessary Essence. It has also been observed that even when the antitheses are expressed by the terms conditioned and unconditioned, or by accident and substance, they still necessarily have here this merely qualitative meaning. Here, accordingly, the really essential point to be dealt with is the formal procedure of the mediation connected with the proof; and, besides, the content and the dialectic nature of the characteristics themselves are not dealt with in the metaphysical syllogisms referred to, nor in Kant’s criticism either. It is, however, just the mediation of this very