no corner of the
world remains available. Even the attempted flight to sun, moon, or stars
does not help. It is true that the newly discovered world is without end,
but, beyond a doubt, in its outermost and innermost depths it is a world
of space and time. Even in the stellar abysses "everything is just the
same as with us."

All this is doubtless correct, and it is very wholesome for religion. For
it prompts religion no longer to seek its treasure, the true nature of
things, and its everlasting home in time and space, as the mythologies and
eschatologies have sought them repeatedly. It throws religion back on the
fundamental insight and on the convictions which it had attained long
before philosophy and criticism of knowledge had arrived at similar views:
namely, that time and space, and this world of time and space, do not
comprise the whole of existence, nor existence as it really is, but are
only a manifestation of it to our finite and limited knowledge. Before the
days of modern astronomy, and without its help, religion knew that God was
not confined to "heaven," or anywhere in space, and that time as it is for
us was not for Him. Even in the terms "eternity" and "infinity" it shows
an anticipatory knowledge of a being and reality above time and space.
These ideas were not gained from a contemplation of nature, but before it
and from independent sources.

But though it is by no means the task of apologetics to build up these
ideas directly from a study of things, it is of no little importance to
inquire whether religion possesses in these convictions only postulates of
faith, for which it must laboriously and forcibly make a place in the face
of knowledge, or whether a thorough and self-critical knowledge does not
rather confirm them, and show us, within the world of knowledge itself,
unmistakable signs that it cannot be the true, full reality, but points to
something beyond itself.

To study this question thoroughly would involve setting forth a special
theory of knowledge and existence. This cannot be attempted here. But
Kant's great doctrine of the "Antinomy of Reason" has for all time broken
up for us the narrowness of the naturalistic way of thinking. Every one
who has felt cramped by the narrow limits in which reality was confined by
a purely mundane outlook must have experienced the liberating influence of
the Kantian Antinomy if he has thought over it carefully. The thick
curtain which separates being fr