PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION 283 



inner experience, by means of a priori laws, into a totality, conform- 

 ing to law, appearing in intuitive forms of space and time, causally 

 and necessarily rigidly connected. The freedom autonomously 

 determining itself out of the logical idea, and contrasting itself with 

 the psychological stream, produces out of the confused psycholican 

 reality this scientific formation of the true reality. The product of 

 thought, however, swallows its own maker. For the same acts of 

 freedom, which autonomously produced the formation of the reality 

 of law, remain themselves in the temporal sequence of psychical 

 events, and, therefore, themselves, with that formation, lapse into 

 the sequence which is under mechanical law. The intelligible Ego 

 creates the world of law, and finds itself therein, with its activity, as 

 empirical Ego, that is, as product of the great world-mechanism and 

 of its causal sequence. It is an intolerable, violent contradiction, 

 and it is no solution of this contradiction to refer the empirical Ego 

 to appearance, and the intelligible Ego to actuality existing in itself, 

 if the operations of the intelligible Ego, also a constituent part of 

 what takes place in the soul, occur in time and so relapse irrecover- 

 ably into phenomenality and its mechanism. All the ingenuity 

 of modern interpretation of Kant has not succeeded in making this 

 circle more tolerable, all shifting of one and the same thing to differ- 

 ent points of view has only enriched scientific terminology with 

 masterpieces of parenthetical caution, but not removed the objection 

 that two different points of view do not, as a matter of fact, exist 

 side by side, but conflict within the same object. 



This circle is especially intolerable for the psychology of religion 

 and its application to the theory of knowledge. The psychology of 

 religion certainly shows us that the deeper feeling of all religion is 

 not a product of the mechanical sequence, but an effect of the super- 

 sensuous itself as it is felt there; it believes that it arises in the 

 intelligible Ego by way of some kind of connection with the super- 

 sensuous world. This, however, becomes completely impossible for 

 the Kantian theory of the empirical Ego, and all distinctions of a 

 double point of view in no wise change the fact that these points of 

 view are mutually absolutely exclusive. Here we have the results 

 of psychology which the expression of religious emotion confirms, in 

 that religion can be causally reduced to nothing else, totally opposed 

 to the consequences of such a theory of knowledge. Kant had him- 

 self often enough practically felt this, and spoke then of freedom as 

 an experience of communion with the supersensuous as a possible 

 but unprovable affair, while all that, in case of a strict adherence 

 to the phenomenality of time and of the theory of the empirical 

 Ego, which is a consequence of it, is completely impossible. No- 

 thing can be of any assistance here except a decisive renunciation 

 of those epistemological positions which contradict the results of 



