en for absolute
knowledge, his intention would have been innocent, his conclusions wise,
and his analysis free from venom and _arriere-pensee_. Man, because of
his finite and propulsive nature and because he is a pilgrim and a
traveller throughout his life, is obliged to have faith: the absent, the
hidden, the eventual, is the necessary object of his concern. But what
else shall his faith rest in except in what the necessary forms of his
perception present to him and what the indispensable categories of his
understanding help him to conceive? What possible objects are there for
faith except objects of a possible experience? What else should a
practical and moral philosophy concern itself with, except the
governance and betterment of the real world? It is surely by using his
only possible forms of perception and his inevitable categories of
understanding that man may yet learn, as he has partly learned already,
to live and prosper in the universe. Had Kant's criticism amounted
simply to such a confession of the tentative, practical, and
hypothetical nature of human reason, it would have been wholly
acceptable to the wise; and its appeal to faith would have been nothing
but an expression of natural vitality and courage, just as its criticism
of knowledge would have been nothing but a better acquaintance with
self. This faith would have called the forces of impulse and passion to
reason's support, not to its betrayal. Faith would have meant faith in
the intellect, a faith naturally expressing man's practical and ideal
nature, and the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits.

[Sidenote: False subjectivity attributed to reason.]

Side by side with this reinstatement of reason, however, which was not
absent from Kant's system in its critical phase and in its application
to science, there lurked in his substitution of faith for knowledge
another and sinister intention. He wished to blast as insignificant,
because "subjective," the whole structure of human intelligence, with
all the lessons of experience and all the triumphs of human skill, and
to attach absolute validity instead to certain echoes of his rigoristic
religious education. These notions were surely just as subjective, and
far more local and transitory, than the common machinery of thought; and
it was actually proclaimed to be an evidence of their sublimity that
they remained entirely without practical sanction in the form of success
or of happiness. The "categoric