Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/25

xxiv direct expression of human rational will: to all of his great successors, on the contrary, this rescuing of faith by identifying it with pure will, after depriving it of all support from intelligence, seemed in fact the evaporation of freedom itself into a merely formal or nominal power, meaningless because void of intelligible contents; and hence the method, so far from being the support, appeared to be simply the undermining of religion. So, in ways successively developing an organic logic, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel set seriously about the task of bringing the entire conscious life, religion included, within the unbroken compass of knowledge. But as they all alike accepted one characteristic tenet of Kant’s theory of knowledge, namely, that the possibility of knowledge is conditional upon its object’s being embraced in the same “unity of consciousness” with its subject, they either had to confess God — for religious consciousness the Supreme Object — unknowable and unprovable (as Kant had maintained in his famous assault on the standard theoretical arguments for God’s existence), or else had to say that God must henceforth be conceived as literally immanent in the world, not as strictly transcendent of it. God, as an intelligibly defensible Reality, thus appeared to become indisputably immanent in our human minds also: this, too, whether our minds were conceived, with Fichte, as having the physical world immanent in them; or, with Schelling, as being embraced in Nature as component members of the Whole informed with God; or, again, with Hegel, as standing over against the members of Nature, members in a