meaning FOR OUR PRACTICE. We can act AS IF
there were a God; feel AS IF we were free; consider Nature AS IF she
were full of special designs; lay plans AS IF we were to be immortal;
and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our
moral life. Our faith THAT these unintelligible objects actually exist
proves thus to be a full equivalent in praktischer Hinsicht, as Kant
calls it, or from the point of view of our action, for a knowledge of
WHAT they might be, in case we were permitted positively to conceive
them. So we have the strange phenomenon, as Kant assures us, of a mind
believing with all its strength in the real presence of a set of things
of no one of which it can form any notion whatsoever.

My object in thus recalling Kant's doctrine to your mind is not to
express any opinion as to the accuracy of this particularly uncouth
part of his philosophy, but only to illustrate the characteristic of
human nature which we are considering, by an example so classical in
its exaggeration. The sentiment of reality can indeed attach itself so
strongly to our object of belief that our whole life is polarized
through and through, so to speak, by its sense of the existence of the
thing believed in, and yet that thing, for purpose of definite
description, can hardly be said to be present to our mind at all. It
is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative
faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner
capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals
of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it
might be consciously determined to different attitudes and tendencies.
Such a bar of iron could never give you an outward description of the
agencies that had the power of stirring it so strongly; yet of their
presence, and of their significance for its life, it would be intensely
aware through every fibre of its being.

It is not only the Ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have
this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent
articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with
them the same kind of impalpable appeal. Remember those passages from
Emerson which I read at my last lecture. The whole universe of
concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for such a
transcendentalist writer, but for all of us, in a wider and higher
universe of abstract ideas, that len