Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/165

Rh could not this Kantian universe be both interpreted, and, after a fashion, even justified? To be sure, by such an interpretation it would be indeed transformed. In my opening lecture I ventured to suggest to you the doctrine that the universe, despite its seemingly stubborn physical fixity, is a live thing, an infinite spirit. According to Kant, the world of the natural order, in space and in time, cannot be thus alive, simply because, apart from our sense and our constructive imagination, this natural order has no existence. Spinoza’s substance, then, would be for Kant a mere mirage; but now, as you see, the true universe for Kant consists of perceiving moral agents, and of the dim and shadowy things in themselves, and of what the practical reason postulates; and that is all. If this be so, however, do we care much for those shadowy things in themselves? Perhaps they aren’t worth knowing. Perhaps they even do not exist at all. Our inner world doesn’t contain them. They are no object of natural science. You can’t weigh them or measure them, much less see them. Perhaps they are, as Hume would say, “sophistry and illusion.” What, then, remains to us? Why, precisely this: the world of the natural order, which, mirage though it be, is the very mirror of our sanity, and is therefore useful enough; this, and the world of our fellow-men, the world of practical and therefore of spiritual relationships, the world of live beings, ignorant, but rational like ourselves. With these we live, we act; we seek to realize through them the moral order; we respect their rights, we love them, we treat them as God’s children. But see: perhaps, in dealing with them, we touch the divine order itself. Perhaps, to use a more modern phrase, God simply differentiates himself into the forms of all these live beings, who may be, for all we know, as numerous, and as various in their degrees of loftiness, as the stars and the atoms of physics. Perhaps in the very depths of their finite ignorance he doesn’t quite lose him-