of the miraculous in the ordinary sense.  If the divine revelation is to be thought as taking place within the human spirit, and in consonance with the laws of all other experience, then the human spirit must itself be conceived as standing in such relation to the divine that the eternal reason may express and reveal itself in the regular course of the mind’s own activity.  Then the manifold moral and religious ideals of mankind in all history must take their place as integral factors also in the progress of the divine revelation.

When we come to the more specific topics of his religious teaching, freedom, immortality, God, Kant is prompt to assert that these cannot be objects of theoretical knowledge.  Insoluble contradictions arise whenever a proof of them is attempted.  If an object of faith could be 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.