chap. iv. Sec. 28). Now this instinct is the instinct of rationality
itself. And the critical idealism of Kant is of religious origin, and it
is in order to save religion that Kant enlarged the limits of reason
after having in a certain sense dissolved it in scepticism. The system
of antitheses, contradictions, and antinomies, upon which Hegel
constructed his absolute idealism, has its root and germ in Kant
himself, and this root is an irrational root.
We shall see later on, when we come to deal with faith, that faith is in
its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason, that to believe is
to wish to believe, and to believe in God is, before all and above all,
to wish that there may be a God. In the same way, to believe in the
immortality of the soul is to wish that the soul may be immortal, but to
wish it with such force that this volition shall trample reason under
foot and pass beyond it. But reason has its revenge.
The instinct of knowing and the instinct of living, or rather of
surviving, come into conflict. In his work on the _Analysis of the
Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical_,[32] Dr.
E. Mach tells us that not even the investigator, the savant, _der
Forscher_, is exempted from taking his part in the struggle for
existence, that even the roads of science lead mouth-wards, and that in
the actual conditions of the society in which we live the pure instinct
of knowing, _der reine Erkenntnisstrieb_, is still no more than an
ideal.
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