After having examined and pulverized with his analysis the
traditional proofs of the existence of God, of the Aristotelian God, who
is the God corresponding to the _zoon politikon_, the abstract
God, the unmoved prime Mover, he reconstructs God anew; but the God of
the conscience, the Author of the moral order--the Lutheran God, in
short. This transition of Kant exists already in embryo in the Lutheran
notion of faith.
The first God, the rational God, is the projection to the outward
infinite of man as he is by definition--that is to say, of the abstract
man, of the man no-man; the other God, the God of feeling and volition,
is the projection to the inward infinite of man as he is by life, of the
concrete man, the man of flesh and bone.
Kant reconstructed with the heart that which with the head he had
overthrown. And we know, from the testimony of those who knew him and
from his testimony in his letters and private declarations, that the man
Kant, the more or less selfish old bachelor who professed philosophy at
Koenigsberg at the end of the century of the Encyclopedia and the goddess
of Reason, was a man much preoccupied with the problem--I mean with the
only real vital problem, the problem that strikes at the very root of
our being, the problem of our individual and personal destiny, of the
immortality of the soul. The man Kant was not resigned to die utterly.
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