296 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



24. 

 Jacobi's 



metaphysical treatment l of the spiritual problem was 

 opposition, started by F. H. Jacobi soon after the publication 

 of Kant's first ' Critique.' In his ' Letters on the 



1 Considering the enormous in- 

 fluence which Kant's teaching had, 

 not only in philosophy but also in 

 general literature, and especially 

 also in theology proper, it may 

 appear as if sufficient had not been 

 said in the text about Kant's actual 

 philosophy of religion. For this 

 there are two reasons. The first is 

 that Kant's peculiar attitude to the 

 religious problem belongs entirely 

 to the eighteenth century, and 

 loses much of its importance with 

 the beginning of the nineteenth, 

 quite a new aspect having been 

 established in the last year of the 

 eighteenth century through the 

 appearance of Schleiermacher's 

 ' Addresses.' And, secondly, it 

 may even be held that a philosophy 

 of religion only begins with the 

 latter work, though it was pre- 

 pared by such writers as Jacobi, 

 Hamann, and Herder. The dif- 

 ference may be better understood 

 if we distinguish three aspects of 

 the religious problem by the terms : 

 Religious Philosophy, Philosophical 

 Religion, and Philosophy of Re- 

 ligion. Before the nineteenth 

 century, and even in Kant's works, 

 there did not really exist a phil- 

 osophy of religion at all i.e., a 

 philosophical (methodical as dis- 

 tinguished from popular or poet- 

 ical) discussion of religious Experi- 

 ence. What existed was : First, a 

 religious philosophy i.e., a theory 

 of the world and life written in a 

 religious spirit, embodying the cur- 

 rently accepted spiritual truths, 

 be they those of natural or of 

 revealed religion. Such a phil- 

 osophy is represented in the writ- 

 ings of very different thinkers, such 

 as the Deists in England and some 

 of their opponents, Rousseau and 



even Voltaire in France, Mendels- 

 sohn and Jacobi in Germany, and 

 a host of others. Secondly, there 

 existed the great works of Spinoza, 

 Leibniz, and Kant, which contained 

 and propounded a philosophical re- 

 ligion, a reasoned creed, with more 

 or less of a desire to understand or 

 paraphrase existing religious teach- 

 ing, expressing in philosophical 

 language what various forms of 

 existing religious teaching ex- 

 pressed in their own way. It was 

 an attempt to interpret, to show 

 the deeper meaning of existing 

 dogmas, retaining or discarding 

 them as they could or could not 

 be brought into a consistent well- 

 thought-out system. Of the latter 

 class Kant was by far the most 

 critical as well as the most re- 

 assuring exponent. He was crit- 

 ical and destructive in his First 

 Critique, in which he showed that 

 the ideas of human reason, such as 

 God, Freedom, and Immortality, 

 were not capable of any rigid 

 demonstration. They existed as 

 Noumena : things thought of but 

 really unknowable in the sense of 

 what we term Knowledge in the 

 phenomenal world. But Kant 

 developed the reassuring side 

 of his doctrine in his Second 

 Critique, in which he established 

 these verities as necessary postu- 

 lates of the moral consciousness ; 

 the undeniable existence of a moral 

 law, and the possibility of follow- 

 ing it, rendering it necessary for 

 the human mind to assume and 

 believe in the existence of a Law- 

 giver, of human freedom to follow 

 His law. and of a larger life in 

 which duty and happiness, existing 

 combined as the highest Good, 

 could be finally realised. What 



