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Page 11
[Footnote 3: See _The Critique of Pure Reason_ (M�ller, tr.), pp. 575
ff.]
[Footnote 4: _Harvard Theo. Rev._, vol. I, no. 1, p. 16.]
Kant is more than once profoundly inconsistent with the extreme
subjectivism of his theory of ideas as when he says in the _Practical
Reason_: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing
admiration and awe the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on
them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within."[5] Again he
remarks, "The belief in a great and wise Author of the world has been
supported entirely by the wonderful beauty, order and providence,
everywhere displayed in nature."[6] Here the objective reality both of
what is presented to our senses and what is conceived of in the mind,
is, as though unconsciously, taken for granted. Thus while he contends
for a practical theism, the very basis of his interest still rests in
the conviction of a Being external to us and existing independent of
our thought.
[Footnote 5: _The Critique of Practical Reason_ (tr. T.K. Abbott), p.
260.]
[Footnote 6: _The Critique of Pure Reason_, p. 702.]
But his intention of making right conduct the essence of religion
is typical of the limits of humanistic interests and perceptions. In
making his division of reason into the theoretical and the practical,
it is to the latter realm that he assigns morality and religion.
Clearly this is genuine rationalism. I am not forgetting Kant's great
religious contribution. He was the son of devout German pietists and
saturated in the literature of the Old Testament. It is to Amos, who
may justly be called his spiritual father, that he owes the moral
absoluteness of his categorical imperative, the reading of history
as a moral order. He was following Amos when he took God out of the
physical and put Him into the moral sphere and interpreted Him in
the terms of purpose. But the doctrine of _The Critique of Practical
Reason_ is intended to negate those transcendent elements generally
believed to be the distinctive portions of religion. God is not known
to us as an objective being, an entity without ourselves. He is an
idea, a belief, which gives meaning to our ethical life, a subjective
necessity. He is a postulate of the moral will. To quote Professor
McGiffert again: "We do not get God from the universe, we give Him
to the universe. We read significance and moral purpose into it. We
assume God, not to account for the world, but for the subjective
need of realizing our highest good.... Religion becomes a creative
act of the moral will just as knowledge is a creative act of the
understanding."[7] Thus there are no ultimate values; at least we can
know nothing of them; we have nothing to look to which is objective
and changeless. The absolutism of the Categorical Imperative is
a subjective one, bounded by ourselves, formed of our substance.
Religion is not discovered, but self-created, a sort of sublime
expediency. It can carry, then, no confident assertion as to the
meaning and destiny of the universe as a whole.
[Footnote 7: _H.T.R._, vol. I, no. 1, p. 18.]
Here, then, the nature of morality, the inspiration for character,
the solution of human destiny, are not sought outside in some sort
of cosmic relationship, but within, either in the experience of the
superman, the genius or the hero, or, as later, in the collective
experience and consciousness of the group. Thus this, too, throws man
back upon himself, makes a new exaltation of personality in sharpest
contrast to the scholastic doctrine of the futility and depravity of
human nature. It produces the assertion of the sacred character of the
individual human being. The conviction of the immeasurable worth of
man is, of course, a characteristic teaching of Jesus; what it is
important for the preacher to remember in humanism is the source, not
the fact, of its estimate. With Jesus man's is a derived greatness
found in him as the child of the Eternal; in humanism, it is, so to
speak, self-originated, born of present worth, not of sublime origin
or shining destiny.
So man in the humanistic movement moves into the center of his own
world, becomes himself the measuring rod about whom all other values
are grouped. In the place of inspiration, or prophetic understanding,
which carries the implications of a transcendent source of truth and
goodness, we have a sharply limited, subjective wisdom and insight.
The "thus saith the Lord" of the Hebrew prophet means nothing here.
The humanist is, of course, confronted with the eternal question of
origins, of the thing-in-itself, the question whose insistence makes
the continuing worth of the absolutist speculations. He begs the
question by answering it with an assertion, not an explanation. He
meets it by an exaltation of human genius. Genius explains all sublime
achievements and genius is, so to speak, its own _fons et origo_. Thus
Diderot says: "Genius is the higher activity of the soul." "Genius,"
remarks Rousseau in a letter, "makes knowledge unnecessary." And
Kant defines genius as "the talent to discover that which cannot be
taught or learned."[8] This appears to be more of an evasion than
a definition! But the intent here is to refer all that seems to
transcend mundane categories, man's highest, his widest, his sublimest
intuitions and achievements, back to himself; he is his own source of
light and power.
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