proof at all in the sense in which they attempted to be proofs. The
existence of God appears as a necessary assumption, if the highest good
and value in the world are to be fulfilled. But the conception and
possibility of realisation of a highest good is itself something which
cannot be concluded with theoretical evidentiality. It is the object of
a belief which in entire freedom is directed to that end. Kant lays
stress upon the fact that among the practical ideas of reason, that of
freedom is the one whose reality admits most nearly of being proved by
the laws of pure reason, as well as in conduct and experience. Upon an
act of freedom, then, belief rests. 'It is the free holding that to be
true, which for the fulfilment of a purpose we find necessary.' Now, as
object of this 'free holding something to be true,' he sets forth the
conception of the highest good in the world, to be realised through
freedom. It is clear that before this argument would prove that a God is
necessary to the realisation of the moral order, it would have to be
shown that there are no adequate forces immanent within society itself
for the establishment and fulfilment of that order. As a matter of fact,
reflexion in the nineteenth century, devoted as it has been to the
evolution of society, has busied itself with hardly anything more than
with the study of those immanent elements which make for morality. It is
therefore not an external guarantor of morals, such as Kant thought,
which is here given. It is the immanent God who is revealed in the
history and life of the race, even as also it is the immanent God who is
revealed in the consciousness of the individual soul. Even the moral
argument, therefore, in the form in which Kant puts it, sounds remote
and strange to us. His reasoning strains and creaks almost as if he were
still trying to do that which he had just declared could not be done.
What remains of significance for us, is this. All the debate about first
causes, absolute beings, and the rest, gives us no God such as our souls
need. If a man is to find the witness for soul, immortality and God at