Does this universe exist or is it a mere figment? It is the product of the reality-producing functions in their ideal completion. It is the necessary postulate required if the idea of right is to have validity, and the idea of right is required by man in so far as he is an agent and not merely a spectator of life. The ethical manifold, the spiritual universe, exists in so far as there is a right.
Have we then reinstated the idea of God as existent? Not the idea of God as an individual. We have on the contrary set aside that idea by affirming that manifoldness cannot be derived from unity, that the positing of plurality is just as much a primary function of the mind as the positing of unity. We have discarded the God-idea as the locus of unity, since the unity subsists in the relation of the units. Strictly speaking, we have replaced the God-idea by that of a universe of spiritual beings interacting in infinite harmony.
But at this point I must go back for a moment to Kant, using his ideas once more as a foil to make my own more explicit. Wilhelm von Humboldt said of Kant that some of the things he had destroyed would never be rebuilt, and that some of the things he had built would never be destroyed.
For more than a hundred years the impression has prevailed that among the things forever destroyed by Kant are the proofs of the existence of God. He is represented as an intellectual giant whose blows have forever shattered the proofs on which the existence of a supersensible reality rested. Kant’s mind was preëminently scientific. He was the philosopher who made explicit the principles underlying Newtonian science as Aristotle had made explicit the logic underlying the Greek science. His philosophy is essentially agnostic. The use that he continues to make of the God-idea can be dissociated from his system with advantage to the latter.[34]
But did Kant indeed destroy the idea of a supersensible reality as existent, or are we warranted in undertaking to build anew the supersensible world.[35] “Du hast sie zerstörrt, die schöne Welt, In deinem Busen baue sie wieder”—not indeed in the realm of mere feelings, but in the sphere of will. The spell of Kant’s shattering attack still rests upon the intellectual world today. The notion of a supersensible reality, if held at all, is held timidly, apologetically and is apt to be based on subjective emotional need. The wish is more or less admitted to be father to the faith—the will to believe is defiantly asserted in despair of sound foundations. A scientist like Dubois-Reymond enumerates seven world riddles, or mysteries that cannot be explained, and after saying that they cannot be explained, he seems to see that no alternative remains but to take refuge in resignation: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus!”
That “explanation” is not the only avenue to truth, that the referring of effects to their causes is not the highest operation of the reality-producing functions, I have pointed out in a previous chapter. But Kant, as has been said, is supposed to have utterly annihilated the arguments intended to demonstrate the existence of God, and it will clear up the matter at issue if we consider wherein he actually succeeded and wherein he quite failed. As he himself declares, his method is regressive; he does not attempt the progressive method path. He seeks to ascertain whether by going backward along the chain of effects and causes, or of conditions, he can somewhere find God as first cause or as unconditioned. He does not look forward looking to the ideals of the will. He does not enter into the realm of ends, where the necessity of determining action in obedience to some universal plan or scheme of relations might have forced itself on his attention. His approach, like his habit of mind, is scientific. He is not primarily an ethicist. Proceeding in this manner he shows that the notion of a first cause is untenable, and he attacks in particular the ontological argument by which every other argument supplements itself at the point where it breaks down.
Did Kant, however, annihilate the Ontological Argument? Yes, in the scholastic form in which it was held. No, in a form, based on the idea of the ethical manifold, in which it can be restated. In the scholastic form it runs: “There is such a thing as the idea of a perfect being. Existence is an element of perfection. If the perfect being did not exist it would be less than perfect. But the ens realissimum, the perfect being, is present as an idea in the mind. Therefore it exists.” The disproof of this amounts to the curt statement that what exists in the mind does not necessarily exist outside of it, or, as Kant put it: “The idea of 100 thalers in the head of a man is one thing, lacking no element of conceptual integrity; while the existence of the 100 thalers in the man’s purse is an entirely different matter.” The evidence of existence, in other words, depends on the synthesis of the data of sense as arranged in the space and time manifold in accordance with the categories of the understanding. Existence is temporal and spatial. To prove that God exists we should have to prove that he exists in the world of the senses. Of any other kind of existence we are agnostic. Kant’s disproof of the Ontological Argument thus depends on his agnosticism.
But suppose that on ethical grounds we find ourselves compelled to affirm that there is an object which has worth, and that to account for the inviolableness, indispensableness and preciousness of this object we are compelled to give free rein to the reality-producing functions, and to place this object having worth as a member in a manifold not spatial and temporal but infinite: and suppose we say that the existence of this worth-endowed object, of this ethical unit with its compeers, is as certain as the notion of rightness is certain, have we not then without blame widened the conception of existence, and placed the Ontological Argument where Kant’s disproof does not even touch it?[36]
One more important remark is here in place, suggested by Kant’s designation of God as the ideal of reason, and by his designation of our highest nature as the rational nature.
Is “rational” equivalent to intellectual? If it be so, then feeling must be classed as irrational, and impulse likewise, since neither feeling nor impulse is subject to logical rules. And then the war will be on between the intellectualists or rationalists and the champions of irrational conceptions of life, since feeling and impulse actually make up the major part of life, and can neither be left out of account nor compressed into intellectualist formulas.[37]