Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity [pp. 250-294]

264 A pologeties. [APRIL
the "imperative categorical" authority, with which his philosophy robed the Practical Reason.*
There is still another sphere of mental activity, in the psychological chart of Kant, lying between the intellectual and
the practical, occupied by what he terms the Judging Faculty,
(" Urtheilskraft,") answering in his critical analysis of its
function, approximately to the Taste. It is the source of our
ideas of beauty, fitness, design, &c., and brings into view, in
its operation, the idea of a final cause. This function, which
is the foundation of all art, also works into, and confirms by
logical deduction from the clear perception of design, the categorical belief of the Practical Reason, in regard to God and
immortality.
From even this brief and bald exposition of the metaphysical
system of Kant, it is not difficult to trace the steps by which it
was carried out into complete subjective idealism, in the hands
of Fichte.
As all science was founded, according to Kant,'on the formal element contributed by the subjective laws of the' mind to
the matter furnished in sensation, it was a very obvious step,
to deny the possibility of any scientific transition to a real outward world at all. There were two possible alternatives left:
the one was philosophic scepticism, in the denial of an external
universe, as reduced to systematic formby Schulze; and the
other, to admit the reality of the external world, but make it a
creation of the subjective mind. For while Kant assumed the
reality of our sensations, and of their material cause, and
admitted, on the grounds we have stated, the absoluteness of
our knowledge, yet that knowledge was cognizable by the
understanding, only in forms derived purely from the reason;
* We have no doubt that the incidental service rendered by the German philo.
sophy, in sweeping away the whole ground work of the miserable sensational or
utilitarian morality of the Paley school of moral philosophers, in both its great
branches, viz: the advocates respectively of the disinterested and the selfish
schemes, (which are only the opposite poles of the same hypothesis, both alike
making virtue to consist in the love of being, and the promotion of the greatest
happiness,) and both of which have flowered and borne fruit copiously in the prolific nursery of New England theology, is one of the chief reasons for the extraordinary and ready acceptance it has met, among some of the ablest thinkers both
in Engla,nd and America.