dation of religion were a matter of profound conviction with the sage
of Koenigsberg, all the deeper perhaps because he would not claim to
subject them to an intellectual dissection or to be able to measure out
heaven and earth in the exiguous terms of human thought.

But as soon as he leaves the plane of the pure or speculative reason and
rises to the level of the practical reason or the will, then the full
truth bursts upon his astonished gaze, clearer than the meridian light.
He sees no more "half shade, half shine," but the truth pours itself
"upon the new sense it now trusts with all its plenitude of power". It
is the will, not the mind, which discloses the full revelation to
Immanuel Kant, and makes him the deeply-reverent, religious man he ever
was, the convinced theist, the believer in his power to control his acts
by the independence of his will, and in the possibility, or rather the
certainty, of his being one day morally perfect--not indeed within the
limits of the life which now is, but in a future life of unlimited
duration. That which to Wordsworth was an intimation was to Kant an
intuition after the vision of the glory of the moral law had flooded his
innermost soul.

And this we may, perhaps, briefly show before bringing the chapter to an
end.

The fundamental principle of the Kantian system is the primacy of the
will. The key to the mystery of man's being Kant finds, not in the
marvellous faculty of intelligence, but in that power of self-movement,
that capacity for self-originated energy which we call the will. Reason
is "regulative," he said, but not "creative" and "constitutive," like the
will. It is the latter faculty which makes us what we are, determines
our life, fixes our character, and decides our destiny. As you act, so
you are. This principle once conceded, the majestic system at once takes
shape. What is it that governs the world of phenomena outside us?
Physical laws, and supreme amongst these laws, that of equilibrium or
gravitation. What is it that governs the reason? The laws of thought,
those aboriginal rules, none of man's creation, but the essentially
necessary guides which he was bound to discover and to follow if he is to
think accurately, that is, if his thoughts are to be in conformity with
fact. And what is it which governs the will of man? "Do you tell me,"
the master would urge, "that the inert masses of the spheres have each
their own movements regulated for them