THE ALLEGED SCEPTICISM OF KANT. LA) 
or as an acting creature? Look at him in the first light. 
Look at him as he allows his intellect to play round the pro- 
blems presented to him on every side, and what do we find? 
We come across this remarkable conclusion, that the main 
result of the critical judgment of man is more lar gely destruc- 
tive than constructive. There is nothing more isolating than 
the exercise of intelligence. On the ground of intellect man 
stands alone; if he uses it more or less than his fellows, 
in either sense, purely as a thinking being he is isolated 
from his fellows. Each on our strict ie we move, as 
Matthew Arnold says. But now change the venue. Let 
us look at man as an acting creature, as one who has every 
kind of relation with his fellow beings, and whose energies 
are constantly altering those relations. So far as he acts, 
man discovers that he isa part of a great social order, and 
that no definition of him which refuses to consider his place 
in that order can possibly be satisfactory. There is no such 
thing as a single human unit in the world of action; it is 
always man, ‘plus his environment, plus his heredity. It 
is man given a task of making the world better than he 
finds it. It is man at every step deeply pledged to those 
around him, bearing other people’s burdens, as part of the 
burden which is imposed on himself. How absurd, therefore, 
to let our views of the world and of its government depend 
purely on the results of thought, mstead of the results of 
human action. Man is, of a course, both a thinking and 
acting creature, but it is in his practical aspect, it is in all 
that sphere which is covered by ethics and morality, in 
which are to be found the real essence, the true definition, 
of his nature. It is thus that we may construe to ourselves 
the real lesson of Kant—a critic, if you like, but not a 
sceptic. Fearlessly critical so far as the work of intelligence 
is concerned; but also fearlessly constructive, because he feels 
the necessity of supplementing intelligence by the practical 
reason, by reason as exercised in the sphere of morals. 
From this standpoint, then, let us regard what Kant 
has to tell us in that sphere which he calls the dialectic of 
the pure reason. In the short space of time allotted to me 
I cannot hope to cover the whole ground; I proceed at 
once to its most important feature, its criticism of the idea 
of God. How does he treat the proofs of God’s existence ? 
Kant, as is well known, reviewed in his dialectic these 
proofs in order, and, one after another, showed their hollow~ 
ness and insufficiency. How shall we prove God’s existence ? 
