Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/167

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This is the interpretation which dawns upon us when we reflect awhile upon Kant’s universe. Mystery enshrouds his world. The curtain of sense is “so thick!” Such darkness is for us beyond it! We know so little. We have nothing left us but morality; and that is just a postulate. But no, is this so little, after all? Suppose that the curtain itself were the picture, that the dark mystery lay simply in this, that we have refused to recognize as divine so much of God’s own essence as we ourselves possess, and have failed to see how our life, just in so far as it is spiritual, is, not a postulating, but a realizing of the divine life. Suppose all this to be no mere hypothesis, but a certainty. Would it not transform our philosophy? Well, I suggest here this transformation, because, as an idea, it was precisely the transformation of the Kantian doctrine which was the common undertaking of the great post-Kantian German idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

Philosophy is full of surprises. Just when you think that the road is ended against a dark and impassable wall, the door opens, as it opened to Kant. And just when you think again that Kant’s discovery is the end, a new life for the first time begins. This is the new life of modern idealism. It accepts in one sense Kant’s result. Yes, it goes further in negation than even he went. He held fast by the things in themselves, whose existence he acknowledged, although he could know nothing about thera. The later German idealists say frankly that they care nothing for the things in themselves, and either doubt or deny whether there are any such things at all. Kant, however, paused at the threshold of the show-world. Beyond, he said, dwells, as we must faithfully believe, a God whom we serve, but who is forever the unknown God. The later idealists say: Indeed, the deepest truth is the truth of the manly will to act morally; but then this will itself embodies in each of us a portion of the divine per-