The Kantian Centennial [pp. 394-424]

THE KANTIAN CENTENNIAL.
tain. We are in a world of shadows-a world orderly, systemiatic, and rationalized indeed, but still necessarily uncertain and
phenomenal. But the instant we emerge into the ethical these
shadows are crystallized into realities. What was a weird and
ghostly structure is transfigured into a temple built without
hands, eternal in the heavens.
Whatever we may think of the soundness of this theory, we
cannot but admire its boldness and its elevation. However fervently we may protest against the gratuitousness of the concessions by which the battle seemed so near to being irrecoverably lost, we cannot but admire the boldness of the movement
by which it seemed to be more than recovered. The effect
of these positions upon the subsequent course of modern speculation has been most salutary. Ethical relations were henceforward exalted to a supreme place in philosophic thought.
Freedom, duty, immortality, and God were not only recognized
as subjects of the highest dignity in speculative schools, but it
has been more than acknowledged that any system which did not
recognize these conceptions and relations, and explain the phenomena which they involve, must be superficial and defective.
So spon as the school of Kant was established, the frivolous and
insincere dogmas and critiques of savans, the sensual orgies of
the voluptuaries of the salon, and the sentimental declamations of the school of nature, were by common consent set
aside and displaced by the grand and commanding relations
which the cafegorical imperative introduced and enforced.
It was impossible that modern thought should ever go back
from the point to which it was carried forward by the uplifting
and surging force of Kant's eloquent and impressive utterances
in respect to man's moral convictions and emotions. We believe,
indeed, that the moral dignity and strength of Kant's system
have been the principal sources of its enduring popularity. Multitudes who could understand little and who cared less about
the speculative questions which he raised, and who were ready
to find in their own incapacity to follow his analyses a decisive
argument that all purely speculative inquiries are incapable of
any solution by the human understanding, have been ready to
assent to the comparatively easy analyses of his critique of the
practical reason and his positive assurances that these must settle
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