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Kant, who was without doubt the most powerful and thorough philosopher of liberalism, said, "man, who is the end, cannot be assumed to have the value of an instrument." And again, "justice, of which the state is the specific organ, is the condition whereby the freedom of each is conditioned upon the freedom of others, according to the general law of liberty."
Kant broke the edges of his metaphysical tools against, not these phantasms, but the logically inconceivable entities which were at once material and non-material, at once 'spiritual' and 'space-filling. There is no such difficulty about hallucinations, which, whatever else may be said about them, are familiar facts of experience.
In this sense Kant destroyed knowledge to make room for a rational faith in a supersensible world, to save the independence and dignity of the human self and the spiritual values of his people. In claiming a place for the autonomous personality in what appeared to be a mechanical universe, Kant gave voice to some of the deeper yearnings of the age.
The thought which intervenes between the Kantian Critique of Reason and the development of thoroughgoing idealism by Fichte, with its criticisms of and additions to the former and its preparation for the latter, may be glanced at in a few supplementary pages. From Kant to Fichte.%
He did not, therefore, see country pursuits from a poet's standpoint, but he appreciated their power of calming men's minds, of dissipating the fog of unrealities, of tending towards what Kant called, in a phrase he quoted with approval, "practical reason."
In reference to the philosophy of religion, we must say that, with all the extravagance, the pantheism and mysticism of his phrases, Fichte's great contribution was his breaking down of the old dualism between God and man which was still fundamental to Kant. It was his assertion of the unity of man and God and of the life of God in man. This thought has been appropriated in all of modern theology.
The Pure Reason, which means with Kant the Faculty of Principles, is Speculative or Practical. As to the point of Free-will, nothing more need be said.
Then the manifold moral and religious ideals of mankind in all history must take their place as integral factors also in the progress of the divine revelation. When we come to the more specific topics of his religious teaching, freedom, immortality, God, Kant is prompt to assert that these cannot be objects of theoretical knowledge.
Of a knowledge from within, that could grasp them in their springing forth instead of taking them already sprung, that would dig beneath space and spatialized time, there is never any question. Yet it is indeed beneath this plane that our consciousness places us; there flows true duration. In this respect, also, Kant is very near his predecessors.
But they were vitally and intensely alive; they transformed their thought into wonderful imagery; or they sang it and they danced it; and they are alive for ever. People talk of "the passing of Kant." It may be. But who will talk of the passing of Plato or even of the passing of Hobbes? No thinker has been so buffeted as Hobbes, and there is no school to accept his central thesis. It is no matter.
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