Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/139

123 between the metaphysics of the modern sciences and the assumptions and conclusions of the Kantian criticism. The latter, in all controverted questions between the two, gave tremendous odds to morality and religion in their conflict with science. All the sciences that dealt with sensible objects, that observed and reasoned about nature and about man as a being in and of the sensible world, were forever forbidden to raise their claims higher than the pretence to afford a tenable arrangement of the phenomena under the forms of space and time, and the twelve constitutional ways of the functioning of intellect called the 'categories.'

Science could never know, or know anything about, the nature of Reality, the ontologically true Being of the World. But to morality and religion there was given not only a defensible, but an obligatory right to believe in,—and even, as many critics of Kant would hold, in some good and just-meaning of the word, to know,—the Thing-in-Itself, the Ultimate Reality, the veritable Being of the World, as Absolute Good-Will or perfect Personality.

Now it is not my purpose to charge modern science with atheism, or even with an unjustifiable agnosticism or hostility to his claims for morality and religion, when it refuses consent to the extreme position of Kant. It is much more sure in the domain of scientific cognition, and somewhat less sure in the region of ethical and religious faith, than was the founder of the Critical Philosophy. In a word, the position of the modern sciences, when revealed to a somewhat trained philosophic self-consciousness, favors the rejection of the Kantian theory of the 'two worlds' and of the Kantian plan for leaving the two in this state of schismatic and antinomic divorce, to seek consolation for a disappointed reason in a doubtfully rational faith.

But meanwhile the demands of humanity for satisfaction to its æsthetical, ethical, and religious sentiments and ideals have not diminished one whit. On the contrary, they have become more imperative and exacting than ever before. The time is, indeed, to use a phrase of Eucken, one of "spiritual anarchy." Or in the words of Sabatier: "To a generation which thought itself able to find repose in positivism in philosophy, utilitarianism in morals, and naturalism in matters of art and poetry, there has