Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/254

 investigations in the form of pure conceptions, and even that this should be reckoned a crime; in other words, it is blamed for showing itself active in a way different from that of sense-perception, or from that followed by imagination and poetry. In the case of Kant we see, at any rate, in his treatment of the subject, the definite presuppositions from which he starts, and the logical result of the reasoning process he follows, so that any opinion arrived at is expressly reached and proved by means of principles, and it is held that any view must be deduced from principles, and be, in fact, of a philosophical kind. In our day, on the contrary, if we go along the highway of knowledge, we meet with the oracular utterances of feeling, and the assertions of the individual person who has the pretension to speak in the name of all men, and as a consequence of this pretends that he has also a right to impose his assertions upon everybody. There cannot possibly be any kind of precision in the characteristics which spring from such sources of knowledge, nor in the form in which they are expressed, nor can they lay claim to be logical or to be based on principles or grounds.

That part of Kant’s criticism referred to suggests the definite thought, first of all, that the proof we are dealing with leads us merely to the idea of a necessary Essence, but that any such characteristic is different from the conception of God, that is, from the characteristic of the most real Essence, and that this latter must be deduced by reason from the former by means of conceptions pure and simple. It will at once be seen that if this proof does not bring us any further than to the idea of an absolutely necessary Essence, the only objection which could be urged against it would be, that the idea of God which is limited to what is implied in this characteristic is at any rate not such a profound idea as we, whose conception of God is more comprehensive, wish for. It is quite possible that individuals and nations belonging to an earlier age, or who, while belonging to our age, are