IDEALISM IN GERMANY 



nation for his contradictions in his preface to the 

 second edition of his work, 1787. There he 

 says that he had " to abolish reason, in order to 

 make room for belief." And this was necessary, 

 in order that he might " confer an inestimable 

 benefit on morality and religion, by showing that 

 the objections urged against them may be 

 silenced forever by the Socratic method, that is 

 to say, by proving the ignorance of the objector. 

 For as the world has never been, and no doubt 

 will never be, without a system of metaphysics 

 of one kind or another, it is the highest and 

 weightiest concern of philosophy to render it 

 powerless for harm, by closing up the sources of 

 error." One of these sources of error, as he 

 says in his " Critique of Pure Reason," is found 

 in men like Locke, who promote the idea that the 

 existence of a god and the immortality of the 

 soul can be proven with mathematical certainty 

 from the fact that there is no knowledge outside 

 of experience. 



What a strange spectacle ! Materialist Locke 

 reprimanded by idealist Kant for insisting that 

 the existence of a god and the immortality of the 

 soul can be mathematically demonstrated, and 

 idealist Kant violently insisting that such a thing 

 is entirely outside of all possible experience and 



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