Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/262

 dialectic relation above referred to according to which the condition, or whatever other definition may be given of contingent existence or the finite, is something whose very nature it is to rise to the unconditioned, to the infinite, and thus in what is conditioned to do away with what conditions, and in the act of mediating to do away with the mediation. Kant, however, did not penetrate beyond the relations of the Understanding to the conception of this infinite negativity. Continuing this argument, he says (p. 641), we cannot avoid having the thought, and yet we cannot entertain it, that a Being whom we conceive of as the Highest should, as it were, say to Himself: I am from eternity to eternity, besides me there is nothing, unless what exists by my will; but whence then am I? Here everything sinks under us, and floats without support or foothold in the presence merely of speculative reason, while it costs the latter nothing to allow the greatest as well as the smallest perfection to go. But there is one thing which speculative reason must above all else “allow to go,” and that is the putting of such a question as, Whence am I? into the mouth of the absolutely necessary and unconditioned. As if that outside of which nothing exists unless through its will, that which is simply infinite, could look beyond itself for an other than itself, and ask about something beyond itself.

In bringing forward these objections, Kant, in short, gives vent to the view which he had, to begin with, in common with Jacobi, and which afterwards came to be the regular beaten track of argument, the view, namely, that where we do not have the fact of being conditioned along with what conditions, it is impossible to form conceptions at all—in other words, that where the rational begins, reason ends.

The fourth error to which Kant draws attention is connected with the ostensible confusion between the logical possibility of the conception of all reality and the transcendental characteristics, which latter will be further