demonstrated it would cease to be an object of faith. It would have been
brought down out of the transcendental world. Were God to us an object
among other objects, he would cease to be a God. Were the soul a
demonstrable object like any other object, it would cease to be the
transcendental aspect of ourselves. Kant makes short work of the
so-called proofs for the existence of God which had done duty in the
scholastic theology. With subtilty, sometimes also with bitter irony, he
shows that they one and all assume that which they set out to prove.
They are theoretically insufficient and practically unnecessary. They
have such high-sounding names--the ontological argument, the
cosmological, the physico-theological--that almost in spite of ourselves
we bring a reverential mood to them. They have been set forth with
solemnity by such redoubtable thinkers that there is something almost
startling in the way that Kant knocks them about. The fact that the
ordinary man among us easily perceives that Kant was right shows only
how the climate of the intellectual world has changed. Freedom,
immortality, God, are not indeed provable. If given at all, they can be
given only in the practical reason. Still they are postulates in the
moral order which makes man the citizen of an intelligible world. There
can be no 'ought' for a being who is necessitated. We can perceive, and
do perceive, that we ought to do a thing. It follows that we can do it.
However, the hindrances to the realisation of the moral ideal are such
that it cannot be realised in a finite time. Hence the postulate of
eternal life for the individual. Finally, reason demands realisation of
a supreme good, both a perfect virtue and a corresponding happiness. Man
is a final end only as a moral subject. There must be One who is not
only a law-giver, but in himself also the realisation of the law of
the moral world.

Kant's moral argument thus steps off the line of the others. It is not a