THE ALLEGED SCEPTICISM OF KANT. 179 
of means to end in the wing of a bird, we may say that the 
skill everywhere displayed implies the existence of an 
Intelligence greater than ours, but not necessarily absolute. 
Or, once more, if | know a man to be good, I can then see 
how his actions are all designed to promote the triumph of 
goodness, but if I have only his actions to go by, shall I be 
likely i in every case to see proofs of his goodness ? 
“ Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravine, shrieks against his creed.” 
There remains, then, the last of these arguments, the 
argument of Anselm and Descartes, which is termed the 
Ontological Proof. In its simpler form it asserts with 
Descartes that, since I know myself to be impertect, I must 
have some standard of absolute perfection to measure by ; to 
which logic answers that a belief in something more perfect 
than myself, not necessarily absolutely perfect, is all that my 
premiss warrants. In its more philosophical form it asserts 
with Anselm that, because the idea of God is absolute per- 
fection, and absolute perfection necessarily includes existence, 
therefore God exists. To this logic has the scornful rejoinder 
that an idea in the mind is one thing, and existence is another, 
and that because I think of three hundred dollars, it does 
not by any means follow that I have them in my pocket. The 
general conclusion is that whether [rely on the cosmological, 
or the teleological, or the ontological argument in seeking 
to prove God’s existence, the verdict of the logical under- 
standing is in each case that | am trusting to a broken reed, 
Such are the arguments of the logical understanding, 
guided by certain intellectual laws, and finding at once its 
strength and its weakness in the limitation which such laws 
impose. Even as these arguments stand, it seems unwise to 
lay too much stress upon them, for they indicate more than 
they destroy, and they convey hints of the mind’s progress 
towards eternal truths, which are far more valuable than 
the merely formal proofs which they seek to destroy. Let 
us phrase the matter for ourselves, without paying particular 
attention to the historical aspects of this philosophical 
question, or the various ways in which Kant’s successors 
dealt with the special conclusions of his critique. The first 
thing we think of is the more or less novel science of com- 
parative religion, a discovery of the nineteenth century, 
which would have saved a good deal of the scepticism of the 
eighteenth century. For what is the main thing which is 
