PROLEGOMENA TOANYFUTUREMETAPHYSICS 837
For let us assume at the outset (as Hume in his Dialoguesmakes Philo grant
Cleanthes), as a necessary hypothesis, the deistic concept of the First Being, in which
this Being is thought by the mere ontological predicates of substance, of cause, and so
on. This must be done because reason, actuated in the sensible world by mere conditions
which are themselves always conditional, cannot otherwise have any satisfaction; and it
therefore can be done without falling into anthropomorphism (which transfers predicates
from the world of sense to a Being quite distinct from the world) because those predi-
cates are mere categories which, though they do not give a determinate concept of that
Being, yet give a concept not limited to any conditions of sensibility. Thus nothing can
prevent our predicating of this Being a causality through reason with regard to the world,
and thus passing to theism, without being obliged to attribute to this Being itself this kind
of reason, as a property inherent in it. For as to the former, the only possible way of pros-
ecuting the use of reason (as regards all possible experience in complete harmony with
itself) in the world of sense to the highest point is to assume a supreme reason as a cause
of all the connections in the world. Such a principle must be quite advantageous to rea-
son and can hurt it nowhere in its application to nature. As to the latter, reason is thereby
not transferred as a property to the First Being in itself, but only to its relation to the
world of sense, and so anthropomorphism is entirely avoided. For nothing is considered
here but the cause of the form of reason which is perceived everywhere in the world, and
reason is indeed attributed to the Supreme Being so far as it contains the ground of this
form of reason in the world, but according to analogy only—that is, so far as this expres-
sion shows merely the relation which the Supreme Cause, unknown to us, has to the
world in order to determine everything in it conformably to reason in the highest degree.
We are thereby kept from using reason as an attribute for the purpose of conceiving God,
but not from conceiving the world in such a manner as is necessary to have the greatest
possible use of reason within it according to principle. We thereby acknowledge that the
Supreme Being is quite inscrutable and even unthinkable in any definite way as to what
it is in itself. We are thereby kept, on the one hand, from making a transcendent use of the
concepts which we have of reason as an efficient cause (by means of the will), in order to
determine the Divine Nature by properties which are only borrowed from human nature,
and from losing ourselves in gross and extravagant notions; and, on the other hand, from
deluging the contemplation of the world with hyperphysical modes of explanation
according to our notions of human reason which we transfer to God, and so from losing
for this contemplation its proper rôle, according to which it should be a rational study of
mere nature and not a presumptuous derivation of its appearances from a Supreme
Reason. The expression suited to our feeble notions is: we conceive the world as ifit
came, in its existence and internal plan, from a Supreme Reason. By this, on the one
hand, we know the constitution which belongs to the world itself without pretending to
determine the nature of its cause in itself; and, on the other hand, we transfer the ground
of this constitution (of the form of reason in the world) upon the relationof the Supreme
Cause to the world, without finding the world sufficient by itself for that purpose.*
Thus the difficulties which seem to oppose theism disappear by combining with
Hume’s principle, “not to carry the use of reason dogmatically beyond the field of all
360*I may say that the causality of the Supreme Cause holds the same place with regard to the world that
human reason does with regard to its works of art. Here the nature of the Supreme Cause itself remains
unknown to me; I only compare its effects (the order of the world), which I know, and their conformity to
reason to the effects of human reason, which I also know; and hence I term the former “reason,” without
attributing to it on that account what I understand in man by this term, or attaching to it anything else known
to me as its property.
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