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THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

it must be, — ever amount to the ought to be? Is the religious judgment, Whatever is, is right, a merely analytical judgment, so that what is is right merely because it is, and the predicate “right” is merely an idle other name for what is already named by its true and best name “is”? Or is it a synthetic judgment, whose whole meaning lies in the complete transcending of the subject by the predicate, of the “is” by the “right,” and in the shining of the Right by its own unborrowed radiance? There can be no question how the religious reason will answer. And there will be, and will ever remain, an impassable gulf between the religious consciousness and the logical, unless the logical consciousness reaches up to embrace the religious, and learns to state the absolute Is in terms of the absolute Ought.

And whether this upward and all-embracing reach can be made by the logical consciousness depends entirely — as I said a few moments ago — upon whether that fundamental premise brought into philosophy by Kant is true or not. If it is true, — if there is no knowledge transcendent of sense, and can be none, — then the absolute Is is tied up in the Being that Professor Royce has described to us, and no refuge is left to the unsatisfied Conscience but the refuge of faith: the religious consciousness will fain still believe though it cannot know, and will maintain a stainless allegiance to the City of God though this be a city without foundations. It was in this attitude of faith as pure fealty to the moral ideal, that Kant left the human spirit at the close of his great labours. It was the only solution left