al imperative" was a shadow of the ten
commandments; the postulates of practical reason were the minimal tenets
of the most abstract Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccountably
imbedded in the old man's mind, he regarded as the evidences of an
inward but supernatural revelation.

[Sidenote: Chimerical reconstruction.]

Only the quaint severity of Kant's education and character can make
intelligible to us the restraint he exercised in making supernatural
postulates. All he asserted was his inscrutable moral imperative and a
God to reward with the pleasures of the next world those who had been
Puritans in this. But the same principle could obviously be applied to
other cherished imaginations: there is no superstition which it might
not justify in the eyes of men accustomed to see in that superstition
the sanction of their morality. For the "practical" proofs of freedom,
immortality, and Providence--of which all evidence in reason or
experience had previously been denied--exceed in perfunctory sophistry
anything that can be imagined. Yet this lamentable epilogue was in truth
the guiding thought of the whole investigation. Nature had been proved a
figment of human imagination so that, once rid of all but a mock
allegiance to her facts and laws, we might be free to invent any world
we chose and believe it to be absolutely real and independent of our
nature. Strange prepossession, that while part of human life and mind
was to be an avenue to reality and to put men in relation to external
and eternal things, the whole of human life and mind should not be able
to do so! Conceptions rooted in the very elements of our being, in our
senses, intellect, and imagination, which had shaped themselves through
many generations under a constant fire of observation and disillusion,
these were to be called subjective, not only in the sense in which all
knowledge must obviously be so, since it is knowledge that someone
possesses and has gained, but subjective in a disparaging sense, and in
contrast to some better form of knowledge. But what better form of
knowledge is this? If it be a knowledge of things as they really are and
not as they appear, we must remember that reality means what the
intellect infers from the data of sense; and yet the principles of such
inference, by which the distinction between appearance and reality is
first instituted, are precisely the principles now to be discarded as
subjective and of merely empirical v