I. Intellectualism and the Kantian Criticism 



From the Renaissance until the eighteenth century there was an 

 attempt to solve the conflict of science and religion by rationalising 

 faith and reducing it to the eternal elements which are included 

 in what is wont to be called Deism: that is to say, to the considera- 

 tion of God as the first cause of the order of the Universe and to 

 the immortality of the soul. In this, rationalists and empiricists — 

 Leibniz and Locke — were in agreement. But this way of solving 

 the conflict, which prevailed during the period of lUuminism, 

 could not satisfy, because at bottom it did not save the con- 

 crete reality of positive religion, but only its abstract intellectual 

 content, which, properly speaking, is not religion, but philosophy ; 

 and further, because the possibility of demonstrating the existence 

 of God and immortality a priori or a posteriori was not admitted by 

 everyone. The medieval mystics and Pascal later had already 

 reacted against this cold and abstract intellectualism. Jean Jacques 

 Rousseau, although he too moved in the circle of Deism, did not 

 seek its foundations in an arid rationalism, but in ingenuousness 

 of feeling. " I do not want," says the Savoyard priest when 

 expounding his profession of faith, " to argue with you, or to try 

 to convince you. All I want to do is to expound what I think in 

 the simplicity of my heart. Examine your own heart during my 

 discourse ; that is all I ask you to do." 



Emanuel Kant gave the coup de grace to religious rationalism 

 by throwing into relief the uselessness of trying to prove theo- 

 retically the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. He 

 distinguishes sharply between pure reason and practical reason, 

 although he tries afterwards to bring them into harmony with his 

 doctrine of the primacy of practical reason. Religion, he says, 

 finds its place in the ordering of the moral conscience. Yet this 

 attempt at conciliation could not satisfy either, because, like the 

 old Deism, it did not preserve the positive historical form oi 

 religion but only the universality of those principles which are 

 necessary for moral life. Intellectualism persisted at the bottom. 

 In fact, only scientific certainty was truly objective for Kant. 



