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Heretofore, when the metaphysical method had been adopted, the object had been the suprasensible; and when knowledge had been made the object of investigation, the method followed had been empirical, psychological. Kant had the right to consider himself the creator of noëtics, for he showed it the transcendental point of view. Knowledge is an object of experience, but its conditions are not.
Thus to the metaphysics of nature there is added a metaphysics of morals, and to the critique of theoretical reason, a critique of practical reason or of the will, together with a critique of religious belief. For even if a "knowledge" of the suprasensible is denied to us, yet "practical" grounds are not wanting for a sufficiently certain "conviction" concerning God, freedom, and immortality.
If the claim of empiricism is true, that all our concepts arise from perception, then not only the science of the suprasensible, which it denies, but also the science of the objects of experience, about which it concerns itself, is impossible.
But for practical reasons, again, the causality of the man in himself must be thought of as entirely different from, and opposed to, the mechanical causality of the sense world. Kant's judgment is, also, no more stable concerning the value of the knowledge of the suprasensible, which is denied to us.
As physics has discarded transcendent causes and learned how to get along with immanent causes, so ethics also must endeavor to establish the worth of moral good without excursions into the suprasensible. The ethical obligations arise naturally from human relations, from earthly needs.
All this is absent in the third science, metaphysics, as science of the suprasensible, and to its great disadvantage.
The inference from our own spiritual, self-conscious, free personality to that of God is no unauthorized anthropomorphism in the knowledge of God we may fearlessly deify our human existence, because God, when he created man, gave his divine nature human form. Reason and freedom are the same: the former is theoretical, the latter practical elevation to the suprasensible.
The one starts with effects evident to the senses and leads to the suprasensible, to the First Cause; the other follows the reverse course. To philosophy belongs all that Adam knew or could know before the fall; had there been no sin, there would have been no other than philosophical knowledge.
Indeed, unless some such suprasensible and unifying principle were available, phonetic spelling would speedily perish in an infinity of degenerate variations. We adduce this illustration as one which very well confirms our main argument.
Freedom is not a dogmatic proposition of theoretical reason, but a postulate of practical reason; and the latter holds the primacy over the former to this extent, that it can require the former to show that certain transcendent Ideas of the suprasensible, which are most intimately connected with moral obligation, are compatible with the principles of the understanding.
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