288 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 



really required, and it especially left no space for it in its abstract 

 philosophy of religion. This space must again be opened by the 

 theory of the actualizing of the religious a priori, and there again 

 lies another improvement of the critical system under the influence of 

 modern psychology. 



If we summarize all this, we have a quantity of concessions by the 

 formal epistemological rationalism to the irrationality of the psycho- 

 logical facts and a repeated breaking down of the over-rigorous 

 Kantian rationalism. Contrariwise, however, the pure psychological 

 investigation is also compelled to withdraw from the unlimited 

 quantity and the absolute irrationality of the multifarious (and of 

 the confusion of appearance and truth) to a rational criterium, 

 which can be found in the rational a priori of the reason only, and in 

 the organic position of this a priori in the system of consciousness in 

 general. By this rationalism alone may the true validity of religion 

 be founded, and by this alone the uncultivated psychical life may 

 be critically regulated. Religion will be conceived in its concrete 

 vitality and not mutilated; it will constantly be brought out of the 

 jumble of its distortions, blendings, one-sidedness, narrowness, and 

 exuberance back again to its original content, and to its organic 

 relations to the totality of the life of reason, to the scientific moral 

 and artistic accomplishments. That is everything that science can 

 do for it, but is not this service great enough and indispensable 

 enough to justify the work of such a science? We do not stop with 

 nothing more than "varieties of religious experience" which is the 

 result of James's method; but neither do we stop with nothing more 

 than a rational idea of religion, which overpowers experience, as was 

 still so in the case of Kant. But we must learn how intimately to 

 combine the empirical and psychological with the critical and norma- 

 tive. The ideas of Hume and of Leibnitz must once more be brought 

 into relation with the continuations of Kant's work, and the com- 

 bination of the Anglo-Saxon sense for reality with the German 

 spirit of speculation is still the task for the new century as well as 

 for the century past. 



