Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/31

1.] has also shown irrefutably the inadequacy of the old proofs which would pass from a concept to reality, or from the contingency of the world and its purposive construction to a divine architect. We cannot ignore these results of Kantian criticism; so much we must grant to agnosticism. But the latter goes far beyond Kant's position. It ignores the fact that Kant himself, by his moral postulates, has made a beginning — incomplete and capable of improvement, it is true — to rationalize religious faith on a new idealistic basis. According to Kant, the existence of God is a "postulate of practical Reason," i.e., a demand which reason must make in order to render conceivable the possibility of the highest good being realized, that is to say, of the moral government of the universe. Kant has indeed conceived the moral government of the world only as an ideal, and looked for its realization through the agency of an all-powerful, divine, inconceivable being. Against this the objection was always ready that this ideal could be nothing more than a devout wish, a Utopia, and that a God postulated in order to realize this ideal could have but a very problematical existence. But how would it be, if the deeper meaning of Kant's postulate were rather this: that just as reason is forced by its own peculiar constitution to find in the world the constant realization of a universal natural and moral order, so also it is compelled to postulate the eternal reason of God as the ground of the progressive rational order of the universe? This thought forms the valuable and permanent kernel which post-Kantian philosophy has freed from the husks of subjective idealism and developed to its logical consequences.

The Philosophy of Religion must not lose itself in the labyrinths of Hegel's dialectical panlogism or in the mysticism of Schelling's theosophy. Nor, on the other hand, should it remain entangled in the meshes of subjective idealism, whose principles, as Kant and his immediate disciples taught, render a proper understanding of religion, especially of the Christian religion, impossible. The province of the Philosophy of Religion is to furnish a rational ground for the belief in God. It fulfils this task, not by dogmatically ignoring inner and outer