ently that to believe is, in
the first instance, to wish to believe.

The will and the intelligence seek opposite ends: that we may absorb the
world into ourselves, appropriate it to ourselves, is the aim of the
will; that we may be absorbed into the world, that of the intelligence.
Opposite ends?--are they not rather one and the same? No, they are not,
although they may seem to be so. The intelligence is monist or
pantheist, the will monotheist or egoist. The intelligence has no need
of anything outside it to exercise itself upon; it builds its foundation
with ideas themselves, while the will requires matter. To know something
is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it,
to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself.

Philosophy and religion are enemies, and because they are enemies they
have need of one another. There is no religion without some philosophic
basis, no philosophy without roots in religion. Each lives by its
contrary. The history of philosophy is, strictly speaking, a history of
religion. And the attacks which are directed against religion from a
presumed scientific or philosophical point of view are merely attacks
from another but opposing religious point of view. "The opposition which
professedly exists between natural science and Christianity really
exists between an impulse derived from natural religion blended with the
scientific investigation of nature, and the validity of the Christian
view of the world, which assures to spirit its pre-eminence over the
entire world of nature," says Ritschl (_Rechtfertgung und Versoehnung_,
iii. chap. iv. Sec. 28). Now this instinct is the instinct of rationality
itself. And the critical idealism of Kant is of religious origin, and it
is in order to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits of reason
after having in a certain sense dissolved it in scepticism. The system
of antitheses, contradictions, and antinomies, upon which Hegel
constructed his absolute idealism, has its root and germ in Kant
himself, and this root is an irrational root.

We shall see later on, when we come to deal with faith, that faith is in
its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason, that to believe is
to wish to believe, and to believe in God is, before all and above all,
to wish that there may be a God. In the same way, to believe in the
immortality of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but to
wish it with such force that thi