human
The pure religious faith is that alone which can serve as basis for a universal Church; because it is a pure reason-faith, in which everyone can participate. [1447] But without the slightest attempt at justification there is thrown in the formula that
gpt
[1448] Thus heaven and hell [1449] and Bible and church are arbitrarily imposed on the
human
(Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, p. 368); but in 1787 appeared the second and modified edition, with a new preface, clearly written with a propitiatory eye to the orthodox reaction.
gpt
All at once the work now became popular, and the praise was as loud and as fulsome as at first the silence had been profound. The literature of the day began to teem with Kantian ideas, with discussions of the new philosophy, and with the praises of its author.... High officials in Berlin would lay aside the weighty affairs of State to consider the Kritik, and among them were found warm admirers of the work and its author.
human
; and, again, that
gpt
(Meiklejohn mistranslates:
human
--Bohn ed. p. xxxvii.) This passage virtually puts the popular religion and all philosophies save Kant's own on one level of moral dubiety. It is, however, distinctly uncandid as regards the
gpt
Whence does the freethinker derive his knowledge that there is, for instance, no Supreme Being? (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Transc. Methodenlehre, 1 H. 2 Absch. ed. Kirchmann, 1879, p. 587; Bohn tr. p. 458.) He had just before professed to be dealing with denial of the
human
--a proposition of no significance whatever unless
gpt
God be defined. He now without warning substitutes the still more undefined expression
human
Supreme Being for
gpt
God, thus imputing a proposition probably never sustained with clear verbal purpose by any human being. Either, then, Kant's own proposition was the entirely vacuous one that nobody can demonstrate the impossibility of an alleged undefined existence, or he was virtually asserting that no one can disprove any alleged supernatural existence--spirit, demon, Moloch, Krishna, Bel, Siva, Aphrodite, or Isis and Osiris. In the latter case he would be absolutely stultifying his own claim to cut the roots of
human
and
gpt
as well as of freethinking and materialism; for, if the freethinker cannot disprove Jehovah, neither can the Kantist disprove Allah and Satan; and Kant had no basis for denying, as he did with Spinoza, the existence of ghosts or spirits. From this dilemma Kant's argument cannot be delivered. And as he finally introduces deity as a psychologically and morally necessary regulative idea, howbeit indemonstrable, he leaves every species of superstition exactly where it stood before--every superstition being practically held, as against