TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION XCV11 



blind the scientific eye to the gentle outgoings of His 

 goodness ; they only give them a wider and more 

 varied range and a more certain embodiment. All 

 is the realisation of an eternal plan, which advances 

 from stage to stage on its sure prescribed way, and 

 which must issue in a perfect result. ' The perishing 

 of worlds' and the 'terrible catastrophes' of Nature but 

 bring in a higher and better order; the goal comes 

 ever more clearly into view. So Kant reaches his 

 sublime contemplation 'of the Creation in the whole 

 extent of its Infinitude in Space as well as in Time/ 

 and exhibits it, in his seventh chapter, with a loftiness 

 of conception and an imaginative grasp that ' takes in 

 all Nature with an easy span,' and is not surpassed in 

 its own way in all literature. And so when, on the 

 latest stage of his thought, he had put forth all his 

 power to establish the eternal basis of the spiritual 

 life of man, 1 his mind seems to revert to the glory 

 of his early vision, and he combines it with his 

 moral conception in that well-known burst of 

 high philosophic rapture : ' Two things there are, 

 which, the oftener and more steadfastly we contem- 

 plate them, fill the mind with an ever new, an 

 ever rising admiration and reverence; the Starry 

 HEAVENS above, the MORAL LAW within /' And 

 both are God's 'of Whom, and to Whom, and 

 through Whom are all things Who is over all, God 

 blessed for ever.' This is ' cosmic theism,' the only 

 true basis of the reconciliation of Science and 



1 Kritik der prakt. Vernunft, Beschhiss (1781). 

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