Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/479

Rh existence of God, freedom and immortality, the three things with which, as he viewed it, metaphysics is most concerned. Here thought finds itself completely baffled and confronted by contradictory possibilities for which there appears equally valid evidence.

Thus metaphysics would appear to be an impossible science—a result in strange contrast with the successive systems of metaphysics which the positive aspect of his work called into being. Kant remained stubbornly true to his conviction that the necessities of thought set their own impassable limits. Agnosticism has thus found

him an able support, and Heine could say of the 'Kritik,' 'This book is the sword with which, in Germany, theism was decapitated.'

Kant, however, would find in practical life and particularly in moral life a way of transcending the limits

of speculative thinking. In his writings on morality and religion he claims that the necessities of practise have also a determining influence on the content of philosophy. Man's morality presupposes as conditions necessary to its existence the very things—God, freedom and immortality—which man's reason can not attain, and the existen