Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/24

Rh successive stages of its growth, by the express declaration of their authors, all had their impulse in doctrines of Kant. Though their religious negations were connected with Kant by a more or less violent misinterpretation of his philosophical method and aim, Kant’s own way of dealing with what he called Theoretical as distinguished from Practical Reason was doubtless still largely responsible for these results, so erasive of Personality, in all its genuine characters, from the whole of existence. The counter-movement in thought was also founded on Kant, by another one-sided construction of his doctrines.

For meanwhile, indeed during a whole generation prior to these negative movements in the English-speaking world and in France, there had followed Kant’s thinking, in Kant’s own fatherland, a succession of systems deriving from his theoretical principles, and distinguished by the great names of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, each aiming to surmount the Agnosticism lurking in Kant’s doctrine of knowledge. If Kant made the bold attempt to remove religion beyond the reach of intellectual assault forever, by drawing around the intellect, under the depreciatory name of the Theoretical Reason, the boundary of restriction to objects of sense; if he thus left religion in the supposed impregnable seat of the Practical Reason, which alone dealt with supersensible things, — with God, with Freedom, and with Immortality, — but dealt with them unassailably, as the very postulates of its own being and action; and if to him this made religion, in all its several aspects of devotion, of aspiration, and of hope, the