polar division in human nature which, after all, was already
established in Kant's own time. Kant demonstrated also that to win
insight into the ethical nature of man with the aid of the isolated
intellect alone implied a trespass beyond permissible limits. In order
to give the doing part of the human being its necessary anchorage,
however, Kant assigned it to a moral world-order entirely external to
man, to which it could be properly related only through obedient
submission.

In this way Kant became the philosopher of that division between
knowledge and faith which to this day is upheld in both the
ecclesiastical and scientific spheres of our civilization.
Nevertheless, he did not succeed in safeguarding humanity from the
consequences of Hume's philosophy; for man cannot live indefinitely in
the belief that with the two parts of his own being he is bound up with
two mutually unrelated worlds. The time when this was feasible is
already over, as may be seen from the fact that ever greater masses of
men wish to determine their behaviour according to their own ideas, and
as they see no alternative in the civilization around them but to form
ideas by means of the discursive reason which inevitably leads to
agnosticism, they determine their actions accordingly. Meanwhile, the
ethical life as viewed by Kant accordingly shrinks ever further into a
powerless, hole-and-corner existence.

*

It is Goethe's merit to have first shown that there is a way out of
this impasse. He had no need to argue theoretically with Kant as to the
justification of denying man any power of understanding apart from the
discursive, and of leaving the faculty of intuitive knowledge to a