All ultimate explanation is to be found in independent being, hence in personal being. This great doctrine follows from the insight here described. It is the doctrine of theism, the doctrine explicitly taught in the religions of Judaism and Christianity. It is a doctrine that elevates and ennobles human life, because it makes man to be of the same nature as the Absolute, though not completed in his act of self-determination. The Absolute self-determined has made his object perfectly a subject-object; the finite self-determined has not yet made his object perfectly self-active, but partially passive. The explanation of man and of the several ranks of being below him in nature is accessible on this line: there is a harmony between philosophy and religion.
II. The Criticism of Kant.—But this ontological proof, after standing criticism for two thousand years and getting translated into varied forms of expression, such, for example, as demonstrations of the existence of God by St. Anselm and Descartes, and the doctrine of the Monad by Leibnitz, was at last attacked by Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, from the standpoint of psychology, and its validity questioned in such a manner that modern philosophy since Kant has furnished few thinkers who have attempted its defence against the new criticism.
It is plain that the old doctrine of independent, self-determined being as the presupposition of dependent, or derivative being, centres in the principle of Causality.
This principle of causality had been so treated by Hume that nothing remained of it except invariable sequence. This amounts to a denial of causality altogether, as ordinarily understood. For a cause should be a being that by its own activity transfers its influence to another being, thereby giving rise to new modifications in it. Cause signifies origination of new determinations, and the root of it is self-determination. Thus, Plato could ask after the source of motion (The Laws, Book X), and assert that the self-moved must be the cause of motion in everything that is moved by something else than itself.
