Kant’s moral argument thus steps off the line of the others.  It is not a 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 all, he must find it within himself and in the spiritual history of his fellows.  He must venture, in freedom, the belief in these things, and find their corroboration in the contribution which they make to the solution of the mystery of life.  One must venture to win them.  One must continue to venture, to keep them.  If it were not so, they would not be objects of faith.

The source of the radical evil in man is an intelligible act of human freedom not further to be explained.  Moral evil is not, as such, transmitted.  Moral qualities are inseparable from the responsibility of the person who commits the deeds.  Yet this radical disposition to evil is to be changed into a good one, not altogether by a process of moral reformation.  There is such a thing as a fundamental revolution of