THE ALLEGED SCEPTICISM OF KANT. 195 
tiken by David Hume which many years ago first interrupted my 
dogmatic slumber, and gave to my enquiries in the field of 
speculative philosophy an altogether new direction.” ‘‘ He broug! t 
no light into this species of knowledge, but he struck, nevertheless, 
a spark from which a light might well have been kindled, if it had 
fillen on susceptible tinder.” Igive prominence to this because of 
its bearing on the allegation against which Dr. Courtney argues, and 
because it raises the crucial question:—Did Kant’s criticism of 
Hume eliminate from the Scotsman’s philosophy the sceptical 
element with which, as all admit, itis charged ? Now the answer to 
this was not,—‘ the conception of the connection between cause 
and effect is not necessarily (as Hume believed) of empirical 
derivation.” It was “the understanding conceives @ priori con- 
nections among things.” The metaphysicians may make some- 
thing of this, but outsiders will express their want of satisfaction 
by asking other questions: What was its outcome? What kind 
of fruit did it bear? What was its influence on German religious 
thought ? Kantian philosophy is more than pure metaphysics. 
The leading intuitions of the speculative Reason are religious. A 
satisfactory refutation of the assertion of “the French critic that 
Kant has spread through the whole of Europe the spirit of doubt,” 
must take into account that scepticism is more than ‘a protest 
against dogmatism and the illimitable liberty of the human spirit.” 
It must deal with it as the denial of dogma in religion and ethies, 
a denial which soon became the zeit geist, the very temper of the 
time, when the Kantian metaphysics was fresh and influential. 
And, doubtless, we are warranted to trace that phase of universal 
scepticism which, even before Kant’s death, began to prevail among 
the Lutheran clergy, to the influence of Kant’s writings. Can we 
apart from them, account for the heresies of the Tiibingen 
school—the pure and historical myths of Strauss, or the Hegeli- 
anism of Baur, who held the miraculous to be impossible, the 
supernatural non-existent, or only an illusion of the natural, and 
Christianity to be no more than the ultimate natural outcome 
of rational thought ? 
I had marked some passages in connection with which a good 
deal might be said as to Kant’s views of the theistic argument from 
Final Causes, the fruits of the cosmological idea, and chiefly, the 
immense service to psychology and religion itself which his virtual 
acceptance of the Aristotelian dictum—“ Intuition must be the 
beginning of science’—might have rendered, had he not pressed 
the intuitional into the shifting sphere of the Practical Reason 
