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 reason or by
scientific thinking, but primarily through the will, or as Kant prefers
to call it, the practical reason. What is meant by the practical reason
is the intelligence, the will and the affections operating together;
that is to say, the whole man and not merely his intellect, directed to
those problems upon which, in sympathy and moral reaction, the whole man
must be directed and upon which the pure reason, the mere faculty of
ratiocination, does not adequately operate. In the practical reason the
will is the central thing. The will is that faculty of man to which
moral magnitudes appeal. It is with moral magnitudes that the will is
primarily concerned. The pure reason may operate without the will and
the affections. The will, as a source of knowledge, never works without
the intelligence and the affections. But it is the will which alone
judges according to the predicates good and evil. The pure reason judges
according to the predicates true and false. It is the practical reason
which ventures the credence that moral worth is the supreme worth in
life. It then confirms this ventured credence in a manifold experience
that yields a certainty with which no certainty of objects given in the
senses is for a moment to be compared. We know that which we have
believed. We know it as well as that two and two make four. Still we do
not know it in the same way. Nor can we bring knowledge of it to others