Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/136

120 as the sum-total of all ends." "This power is nothing but personality, that is, freedom and independence of the mechanism of nature, ... a faculty of a being which is subject to special laws ... given by its own reason."

But alas! at once the shadow of the scepticism of the so-called Critique of Pure Reason falls over the sunlit landscape of this fair picture. The inspiring apostrophe to Duty—"sublime and mighty name"—ends with the reminder that man belongs, after all, to two worlds which must forever remain two; the one of a knowledge that has no power to quench the thirst for knowledge, and the other of a faith that can never justify itself by cognitive connections with the experiences of the daily life presided over by sense and intellect. These two worlds, the world of the human machine and the world of the free personality, are left discordant and mutually conflicting. There is absolutely no hope that reflective and critical thinking will ever be able to unite them so as to make man's world a speculatively harmonious and practically available conception. And from out the shade of this Upas tree come the discordant and terrifying notes of a whole brood of antinomies and subreptions and conclusions derived by the "logic of illusion."

During the century which has elapsed since the death of Kant, the reflective thinking of the western world has been chiefly occupied in the effort to heal the schism between the two worlds which the critical philosophy had left so patent and so alarming. From the point of view of speculative philosophy, this effort may be said to have in view the forming of such a conception of the Being of the World, established by critical and reflective thinking upon a basis of scientific truth, as shall be compatible with the satisfactions of man's æsthetical, ethical, and religious experience. From the point of view of final purpose, the point of view which emphasizes the practical mission of philosophy, the effort may be defined as having for its goal the establishment of a rational faith in the moral and religious conceptions and ideals of humanity. But is not this effort to heal the schism, to unite the two worlds, which, led by the motive of speculative interest on the one hand and of regard for the practical affairs of