the immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the
soul from the existence of God. The categorical imperative leads us to a
moral postulate which necessitates in its turn, in the teleological or
rather eschatological order, the immortality of the soul, and in order
to sustain this immortality God is introduced. All the rest is the
jugglery of the professional of philosophy.

The man Kant felt that morality was the basis of eschatology, but the
professor of philosophy inverted the terms.

Another professor, the professor and man William James, has somewhere
said that for the generality of men God is the provider of immortality.
Yes, for the generality of men, including the man Kant, the man James,
and the man who writes these lines which you, reader, are reading.

Talking to a peasant one day, I proposed to him the hypothesis that
there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a
Consciousness[6] of the Universe, but that for all that the soul of
every man may not be immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. He
replied: "Then wherefore God?" So answered, in the secret tribunal of
their consciousness, the man Kant and the man James. Only in their
capacity as professors they were compelled to justify rationally an
attitude in itself so little rational. Which does not mean, of course,
that the attitude is absurd.

Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the
real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel,
continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that
reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of
definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe,
like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a
hole and enclosing it with steel.

Another man, the man Joseph Butler, the Anglican bishop who lived at the
beginning of the eighteenth century and whom Cardinal Newman declared to
be the greatest man in the Anglican Church, wrote, at the conclusion of
the first chapter of his great work, _The Analogy of Religion_, the
chapter which treats of a future life, these pregnant words: "This
credibility of a future life, which has been here insisted upon, how
little soever it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the
purposes of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof would.
Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life, would not be
a proof of religion