and the
understanding of the moral meaning of things.[3] Kant thus uses his word
critique in accordance with the strict etymological meaning of the root.
He seeks to make a clear separation between the provinces of belief and
knowledge, and thus to find an adjustment of their claims. Of an object
of belief we may indeed say that we know it. Yet we must make clear to
ourselves that we know it in a different sense from that in which we
know physical fact. Faith, since it does not spring from the pure
reason, cannot indeed, as the old dogmatisms, both philosophical and
theological, have united in asserting, be demonstrated by the reason.
Equally it cannot, as scepticism has declared, be overthrown by the pure
reason.

The ancient positive dogmatism had been the idealistic philosophy of
Plato and Aristotle. The old negative dogmatism had been the materialism
of the Epicureans. To Plato the world was the realisation of ideas.
Ideas, spiritual entities, were the counterparts and necessary
antecedents of the natural objects and actual facts of life. To the
Epicureans, on the other hand, there are only material bodies and
natural laws. There are no ideas or purposes. In the footsteps of the
former moved all the scholastics of the Middle Age, and again, even
Locke and Leibnitz in their so-called 'natural theology.' In the
footsteps of the latter moved the men who had made materialism and
scepticism to be the dominant philosophy of France in the latter half of
the eighteenth century. The aim of Kant was to resolve this age-long
contradiction. Free, unprejudiced investigation of the facts and laws of
the phenomenal world can never touch the foundations of faith. Natural
science can lead in the knowledge only of the realm of the laws of
things. It cannot give us the inner moral sense of those things. To
speak of the purposes of nature as men had done was absurd. Natural
theology, as men had talked of it, was impossible. What science can give
is a knowledge of the facts about us in the world, of the growth of the
cosmos, of the development of life, of the course of history, all viewed
as necessary sequences of cause and effect.

[Footnote 3: Paulsen, _Kant_, a. 2.]

On the other hand, with the idealists, Kant is fully persuaded that
there is a meaning in things and that we can know it. There is a sense
in life. With immediate certainty we set moral good as the absolute aim
in life. This is done, however, not through the pure rea