PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION 281 



a residuum of the inconceivable, that is, inconceivable since it is 

 illusion and error. This amounts to saying that reality is never 

 fully rational, but is engaged in a struggle between the rational 

 and anti-rational. The anti-rational or irrational, in the sense of 

 psychological illusion and error, belongs also to the real, and strives 

 against the rational. The true and rational reality to be attained 

 by thought is always in conjunction with the untrue reality, the 

 psychological, that containing illusion and error. 



All this signifies that the rationalism of the theory of knowledge 

 must be conditional, partly owing to the corrective and enriching 

 fecundation by primitive and naive thought, partly owing to never 

 quite separable admixture of illusion and error. So, long ago, the 

 system of categorical forms, as Kant constructed it for theoretical 

 and practical reason, began to change, and can never again acquire 

 the rigidity which Kant's rationalism intended to give it forever- 

 more. And thus the critical system's rational reality of law produced 

 by reason always contains below itself and beside itself the merely 

 psychological reality of the factual, to which also illusion and error 

 belong, --a reality which can never be rationalized, but only set 

 aside. This, too, is also true for the philosophy of religion : the rational 

 reduction of the psychological facts of religion to the general laws of 

 consciousness w r hich prevail among them is a task constantly to be 

 resumed anew by the study of reality, and follows the movements 

 of primitive religion in order to find there first the rational basis; 

 the reduction is, however, always approximate, can comprehend 

 the main points only, and must leave much open, the rational ground 

 for which is not or not yet evident; finally it has unceasingly to 

 reckon with the irrational as illusion and error, which attaches to the 

 rational, and yet is not explainable by it. The two realities, which 

 the critical system must recognize at its very foundation, continue 

 in strife with each other, and this strife as the strife of divine truth 

 with human illusion is for the science of religion of still more im- 

 portance. 



The second correction of the Kantian teaching is only a further 

 consequence from this state of things. If the attitude of psychology 

 and theory of knowledge requires a strict separation, it requires it 

 only for the purpose of more correct relation. The laws of the theory 

 of knowledge are separated from the merely psychological actuality, 

 but still can be produced only out of it. Thus, as a matter of fact, 

 psychological analysis is always the presupposition for the correct 

 conception of all these laws. Psychology is the entrance gate to 

 theory of knowledge. This is true for theoretical logic as well as for 

 the practical logic of the moral, the sesthetical, and the religious. 

 But just at this point the present, on the basis of its psychological 

 investigation, presses far beyond the original form of the Kantian 



