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Kant's real position about all these matters is, I venture to say, almost identical with that of Sir Walter Scott. A Scot himself, by descent, Kant may have heard tales of second-sight and bogles. Like Scott, he dearly loved a ghost-story; like Scott he was canny enough to laugh, publicly, at them and at himself for his interest in them. Yet both would take trouble to inquire.
Further, whatever view we adopt as to its ultimate value, it must be recognized that the imagination of the great metaphysicians, by the originality and fearlessness of its conceptions, by its skill in perfecting all parts of its work, is inferior to no other form. It is equal to the highest, if it does not indeed surpass them. Cf. the Preface to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
On the contrary, in Kant's opinion the material world is only the presentation to our senses of something deeper, of which our senses are no judge. The reality lies behind this sensible presentation and appearance. The world of religious belief is the world of this transcendent reality.
Finally, reason demands realisation of a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One who is not only a law-giver, but in himself also the realisation of the law of the moral world. Kant's moral argument thus steps off the line of the others.
Fries decides: The criticism of reason is an empirico-psychological inquiry, as in general empirical psychology forms the basis of all philosophy. With the exception of this divergence in method Fries accepts Kant's results almost unchanged, unless we must call the leveling down which they suffer at his hands a considerable alteration.
Unsatisfactory as they are in this form, the opinions referred to are echoes of a pregnant doctrine of Kant's the doctrine that the moral consciousness brings us into closer touch with reality than the merely theoretical reason can reach. Various lines of recent thought may be said to have been suggested by this view.
Only the quaint severity of Kant's education and character can make intelligible to us the restraint he exercised in making supernatural postulates. All he asserted was his inscrutable moral imperative and a God to reward with the pleasures of the next world those who had been Puritans in this.
After speaking warmly of Kant's great service to philosophy, he describes thus the problem which Kant regarded as impossible of solution and which he himself, Schiller, was bold enough to attempt: When I consider how closely our feeling for the beautiful and the great is connected with the noblest part of our being, it is impossible for me to regard this feeling as a mere subjective play of the emotional faculty, capable of none but empirical rules.
Persons who desire to learn something of astronomy, geology, chemistry, philology, etc., never think of finding what they require in the pages of a novel, but apply at once to the text- books of the respective sciences, and would as soon hunt for a lover's sentimental dialogue in Newton's 'Principia, or spicy small-talk in Kant's 'Critique, as expect an epitome of modern science in a work of fiction."
On this occasion, whilst illustrating Kant's notions of the animal economy, it may be as well to add one other particular, which is, that for fear of obstructing the circulation of the blood, he never would wear garters; yet, as he found it difficult to keep up his stockings without them, he had invented for himself a most elaborate substitute, which I shall describe.
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