To Kant we owe the debt, that he put an
end to this state of things. He made the real evidence for religion that
of the moral sense, of the nonscience and hearts of men themselves. The
real ground of religious conviction is the religious experience. He thus
set free both science and religion from an embarrassment under which
both laboured, and by which both had been injured.

Kant parted company with the empirical philosophy which had held that
all knowledge arises from without, comes from experienced sensations, is
essentially perception. This theory had not been able to explain the
fact that human experience always conforms to certain laws. On the other
hand, the philosophy of so-called innate ideas had sought to derive all
knowledge from the constitution of the mind itself. It left out of
consideration the dependence of the mind upon experience. It tended to
confound the creations of its own speculation with reality, or rather,
to claim correspondence with fact for statements which had no warrant in
experience. There was no limit to which this speculative process might
not be pushed. By this process the medieval theologians, with all
gravity, propounded the most absurd speculations concerning nature. By
this process men made the most astonishing declarations upon the basis,
as they supposed, of revelation. They made allegations concerning
history and the religious experience which the most rudimentary
knowledge of history or reflection upon consciousness proved to be quite
contrary to fact.

Both empiricism and the theory of innate ideas had agreed in regarding
all knowledge as something given, from without or from within. The
knowing mind was only a passive recipient of impressions thus imparted
to it. It was as wax under the stylus, _tabula rasa_, clean paper
waiting to be written upon. Kant departed from this radically. He
declared that all cognition rests upon the union of the mind's activity
with its receptivity. The material of thought, or at least some of the
materials of thought, must be given us in the multiformity of our
perceptions, through what we call experience from the outer world. On
the other hand, the formation of this material into knowledge is the
work of the activity of our own minds. Knowledge is the result of the
systematising of experience and of reflection upon it. This activity of
the mind takes place always in accordance with the mind's own laws. Kant
held them to the absolute dependence o