Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/163

This page needs to be proofread.
126
THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

prerequisite to science, does it follow that this is sufficient for science? May not the non-limited use of the Categories be requisite before science is made out, — requisite quite as unquestionably as their concentration upon perceptions, and even more significantly?

Suppose they do have to be “schematised” in Time, or else be useless for science: does it follow that they will produce science just by being schematised? — may not a conjoined use of them in an utterly unrestricted meaning be needed, in order to establish judgments of absolutely universal and necessary scope, over even the course of Nature? But what are the Categories, taken thus without restriction, but just the elements of the moral and religious consciousness? Kant himself can find no better name for the moral reason than “Causality with Freedom,” nor any fitter name for primary creativeness. In short, the question really is: Can science be shown in secure possibility, can the logical consciousness ever reach objective reality even in the natural world, without the direct aid of the moral and religious consciousness? — without this consciousness adding itself into the very circuit of logic, as the completing term by which alone the circuit becomes solid, self-sustaining, and incapable of disruption? For if it can, then the asserted primacy of moral reason is merely nominal, and only means that moral reason has an ideal province of its own, out of all organic connexion with any world determinably real. But if it cannot, then moral reason is really primate, the reality of the scientific thinker as a moral being becomes the supreme condition and the demonstrating basis of science and of