alidity.

"Merely empirical" is a vicious phrase: what is other than empirical is
less than empirical, and what is not relative to eventual experience is
something given only in present fancy. The gods of genuine religion, for
instance, are terms in a continual experience: the pure in heart may see
God. If the better and less subjective principle be said to be the moral
law, we must remember that the moral law which has practical importance
and true dignity deals with facts and forces of the natural world, that
it expresses interests and aspirations in which man's fate in time and
space, with his pains, pleasures, and all other empirical feelings, is
concerned. This was not the moral law to which Kant appealed, for this
is a part of the warp and woof of nature. His moral law was a personal
superstition, irrelevant to the impulse and need of the world. His
notions of the supernatural were those of his sect and generation, and
did not pass to his more influential disciples: what was transmitted was
simply the contempt for sense and understanding and the practice,
authorised by his modest example, of building air-castles in the great
clearing which the Critique was supposed to have made.

It is noticeable in the series of philosophers from Hobbes to Kant that
as the metaphysical residuum diminished the critical and psychological
machinery increased in volume and value. In Hobbes and Locke, with the
beginnings of empirical psychology, there is mixed an abstract
materialism; in Berkeley, with an extension of analytic criticism, a
popular and childlike theology, entirely without rational development;
in Hume, with a completed survey of human habits of ideation, a
withdrawal into practical conventions; and in Kant, with the conception
of the creative understanding firmly grasped and elaborately worked out,
a flight from the natural world altogether.

[Sidenote: The Critique a word on mental architecture.]

The Critique, in spite of some artificialities and pedantries in
arrangement, presented a conception never before attained of the rich
architecture of reason. It revealed the intricate organisation,
comparable to that of the body, possessed by that fine web of
intentions and counter-intentions whose pulsations are our thoughts. The
dynamic logic of intelligence was laid bare, and the hierarchy of ideas,
if not always correctly traced, was at least manifested in its
principle. It was as great an enlargement of Hume's work