152 Science Religion and Reality 



Moral certainty, based on subjective feeling, presented itself as a 

 substitute with which one was to be contented for want of a better. 

 Notwithstanding the doctrine of the primacy of practical reason 

 which permitted one to pass the confines of experience, science 

 really preserved its authority in the Kantian system. But the 

 radical defect of this pretended conciliation was the dualism of pure 

 reason and of practical reason, of phenomenon and noumenoriy of 

 necessity and liberty, because it is exactly in the world of phenomena 

 that man must act, and because his liberty, relegated from the 

 noumenon, does not permit him to break through the necessarily 

 rigid bond of the laws of experience. It was the task of subsequent 

 philosophers to overcome this dualism, and to show that reason 

 is a myth and that liberty lies at the root of necessity, because 

 the ordering of natural laws is freely created by the spirit. The 

 credit of initiating this task, which was afterwards completed by 

 Pragmatism, lies with Fichte. 



2. The Romantic Conception of Religion 



The equilibrium of pure reason and of practical reason was 

 somewhat unstable and destined to be shattered, now leaning to- 

 wards the subjective feeling of romanticism, and now towards the 

 objective world of science as portrayed by Positivism. In the 

 first instance there was a rebellion against the intellectualism of 

 the eighteenth century and a turning towards the romantic liberty 

 of feeling which breaks the iron bond of natural necessity, together 

 with a disregard for positive science. According to Schleiermacher, 

 neither the intellect nor the will introduces one into the religious 

 sphere. Religion is not knowledge, nor is it a precept ; it is a life, 

 an individual experience, and this life has its origm in the most 

 profound part of our being, in the feelings. The man, however, 

 who experiences religious emotion feels the need of explaining 

 intelligently the nature and the reason of his state of mind, and he 

 interprets it as a feeling of the dependence of our being on the 

 infinite cause of the Universe. This feeling, however, cannot be 

 adequately translated into ideas : representations and concepts are 

 merely symbols which serve for the communication of that feeling. 

 All the ways of representing or of conceiving the Divinity and its 

 relationships with the world and with man, the whole complex of 

 dogmas, are merely symbolical expressions of that direct experience. 

 Even if it is shown that they do not correspond to anything objective, 



