"Luther is not only the greatest but the most German man in our history. . . . He possessed qualities that we seldom see associated—nay, that we usually find in the most hostile antagonism. He was at once a dreamy mystic and a practical man of action. . . . He was both a cold scholastic word-sifter and an inspired God-drunk prophet. . . . He was full of the awful reverence of God, full of self-sacrificing devotion to the Holy Spirit, he could lose himself entirely in pure spirituality. Yet he was fully acquainted with the glories of this earth; he knew how estimable they are; it was his lips that uttered the famous maxim—
"'Who loves not woman, wine and song,
Remains a fool his whole life long.'
He was a complete man, I might say an absolute man, in whom there was no discord between matter and spirit. To call him a spiritualist would be as erroneous as to call him a sensualist. . . . Eternal praise to the man whom we have to thank for the deliverance of our most precious possessions."
And again speaking of Luther's work:
"Thus was established in Germany spiritual freedom, or as it is called, freedom of thought. Thought became a right and the decisions of reason legitimate."
The specific correctness of the above is of slight importance as compared with the universality of the tradition which made these ideas peculiarly Germanic, and Luther, therefore, a genuine national hero and type.
It is, however, with Kant that I commence. In Protestant Germany his name is almost always associated with that of Luther. That he brought to consciousness the true meaning of the Lutheran
reformation is a commonplace of the German historian. One can hardly convey a sense of the unique position he occupies in the German thought of the last two generations. It is not that every philosopher is a Kantian, or that the professed Kantians stick literally to his text. Far from it. But Kant must always be reckoned with. No position unlike his should be taken up till Kant has been reverently disposed of, and the new position evaluated in his terms. To scoff at him is fair sacrilege. In a genuine sense, he marks the end of the older age. He is the transition to distinctively modern thought.
One shrinks at the attempt to compress even his leading ideas into an hour. Fortunately for me, few who read my attempt will have sufficient acquaintance with the tomes of Kantian interpretation and exposition to appreciate the full enormity of my offense. For I cannot avoid the effort to seize from out his highly technical writings a single idea and to label that his germinal idea. For only in this way can we get a clew to those general ideas with which Germany characteristically prefers to connect the aspirations and convictions that animate its deeds.
Adventuring without further preface into this field, I find that Kant's decisive contribution is the idea of a dual legislation of reason by which are marked off two distinct realms—that of science and that of morals. Each of these two realms has its own final and authoritative constitution: On one hand, there is the world of sense, the world of phenomena in space and time in which science is at home; on the other hand, is the supersensible, the noumenal world, the world of moral duty and moral freedom.
Every cultivated man is familiar with the conflict of science and religion, brute fact and ideal purpose, what is and what ought to be, necessity and freedom. In the domain of science causal dependence is sovereign; while freedom is lord of moral action. It is the proud boast of those who are Kantian in spirit that Kant discovered laws deep in the very nature of things and of human experience whose recognition puts an end forever to all possibility of conflict.
In principle, the discovery is as simple as its application is far-reaching. Both science and moral obligation exist. Analysis shows that each is based upon laws supplied by one and the same