364 Kant: A Biographythe undiminished honor to the one, who really deserved it."^134 This decla¬
ration made Fichte — who had not really wanted to publish the book anony¬
mously in the first place — immediately famous as the foremost Kantian.
It could be argued that Fichte would have had much less impact if the
book had been published in his own name. Kant also had other reasons to
make sure that the book was not considered his own work. Though Fichte's
Critique of All Revelation begins from the Kantian point of view, arguing
that morality is prior to religion and that morality is what makes us re¬
ceptive to revelation, he also assigned a greater importance to religion and
revelation than Kant was willing to grant it. For Fichte, religion had to an¬
swer the problem of how "the propositions, which are accepted through the
law of reason, can practically motivate us."^135 This was not really an open
question for Kant, and, though he would have agreed that the "idea of
God, as the lawgiver through moral laws in us, is founded on a projection
from us, [that is,] on transferring something subjective to a being external
to us," and that "this projection {Entäußerung) is the real principle of reli¬
gion,'''' he would not have put it in those terms. In a sense, Kant was put¬
ting distance between his own view and that of Fichte. It was Kantian, but
it was not Kant.
In July, Kant also asked that the article he had sent to the Berlinische
Monatsschrift be sent back to him, because he "did not want to hold back
from the public the three essays, which belonged to ... the article on
radical evil."^136 He promised Biester that he would "soon" send another
"exclusively moral" essay, which was to deal with Garve's critique of the
Kantian principle of morals.^137 This was what later became Part I of his
essay "On the Old Saw 'That May Be Right in Theory, but It Won't Work
in Practice'." Before finishing this essay, he created the Religion within the
Limits of Mere Reason by putting together four essays that he felt belonged
together. This time, rather than submitting the entire volume to the Berlin
censorship office, he decided to give it to a faculty of theology, who would
determine whether it was a contribution to biblical theology or philosophy.
This was not a merely theoretical matter. Prussian professors had a right
to exempt themselves from the Berlin censorship and to have their books
censored by a dean of their faculty. If the Religion was indeed a philo¬
sophical book, then the dean of the philosophical faculty could give per¬
mission to have it printed. Reluctant to involve the theological faculty in
Königsberg, Kant first planned to send it to the University of Göttingen,
and then considered the University of Halle. Since Halle had just rejected
Fichte's Critique of All Revelation, however, and since the Königsberg the-