282 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 



teaching. This is not the place to describe this, more closely, with 

 reference to the first of the subjects just mentioned. But it is im- 

 portant to insist that this is especially true with respect to the 

 Kantian doctrine of religion. The Kantian doctrine of religion is 

 founded on the moral and religious psychology of Deism, which had 

 made the connection, frequent in experience, of moral feelings with 

 religious emotion the sole basis of the philosophy of religion, and 

 had, in the manner of the psychology of the eighteenth century, 

 immediately changed this connection into intellectual reflections, 

 in accord with which the moral law demands its originator and 

 guarantee. Kant accepted this psychology of religion without proof 

 and built upon it his main law of the religious consciousness, in 

 accordance with which a synthetic judgment a priori is operative 

 in religion (arising in the moral experience of freedom), which 

 requires that the world be regarded as subject to the purposes of 

 freedom. It is, however, extremely one-sided, to give religion its 

 place just between the elements, and a rather violent translation of 

 the religious constitution into reflection. The error of this psycho- 

 logy of religion had been discovered and corrected already by Schleier- 

 macher. But Schleiermacher, for his part too, also failed to deny 

 himself an altogether too sudden metaphysical interpretation of the 

 religious a priori which he had demonstrated, since he not only 

 described the a priori judgment of things, from the point of view of 

 absolute dependence upon God, as a vague feeling, but raised this 

 feeling, by reason of the supposed lack of difference, in it, between 

 thought and will, reason and being, to a world-principle, and inter- 

 preted the idea of God contained in this feeling in the terms of his 

 Spinozism, the lack of difference between God and Nature within 

 the Absolute. A real theory of knowledge of religion must keep 

 itself much more independent of all metaphysical presuppositions 

 and inferences, and must admit that the essence of the religious 

 a priori is extorted from a thoroughly impartial psychological 

 analysis. And this is always the place where works, such as those 

 of James, come into play. Religion as a special category or form of 

 psychical constitution, the result of a more or less vague presence 

 of the divine in the soul, the feeling of presence and reality with 

 reference to the superhuman or infinite, that is without any doubt 

 a much more correct point of departure for the analysis of the rational 

 a priori of religion, and it remains to make this new psychology 

 fruitful for the theory of knowledge of religion. That will be one of 

 the chief tasks of the future. 



The third change relates to the distinction of the empirical and 

 intelligible Ego, which Kant connected closely, almost indissolubly 

 with his main epistemological thought of the formal rationalisms 

 immanent in experience. Kant rationalized the whole outer and 



