e man to whom the
revelation is addressed. It is clear that the whole matter of revelation
is thus apprehended by Kant with more externality than we should have
believed. His thought is still essentially archaic and dualistic. He is,
therefore, now and then upon the point of denying that such a thing as
revelation is possible. The very idea of revelation, in this form, does
violence to his fundamental principle of the autonomy of the human
reason and will. At many points in his reflection it is transparently
clear that nothing can ever come to a man, or be given forth by him,
which is not creatively shaped by himself. As regards revelation,
however, Kant never frankly took that step. The implications of his own
system would have led him to that step. They led to an idea of
revelation which was psychologically in harmony with the assumptions of
his system, and historically could be conceived as taking place without
the interjection of the miraculous in the ordinary sense. If the divine
revelation is to be thought as taking place within the human spirit, and
in consonance with the laws of all other experience, then the human
spirit must itself be conceived as standing in such relation to the
divine that the eternal reason may express and reveal itself in the
regular course of the mind's own activity. Then the manifold moral and
religious ideals of mankind in all history must take their place as
integral factors also in the progress of the divine revelation.

When we come to the more specific topics of his religious teaching,
freedom, immortality, God, Kant is prompt to assert that these cannot be
objects of theoretical knowledge. Insoluble contradictions arise
whenever a proof of them is attempted. If an object of faith could be
demonstrated it would cease to be an object of faith. It would have been
brought down out of the transcendental world. Were God to us an object
among other objects, he would cease to be a God. Were the soul a
demonstrable object like any other object, it would cease to be the
transcendental aspect of ourselves. Kant makes short work of the
so-called proofs for the existence of God which had done duty in the
scholastic theology. With subtilty, sometimes also with bitter irony, he
shows that they one and all assume that which they set out to prove.
They are theoretically insufficient and practically unnecessary. They
have such high-sounding names--the ontological argument, the
cosmological, the phys