Note 243 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

All the while, however, Kant’s theism was radically irreconcilable with the prevailing religion. As appears from his cordial hostility to the belief in ghosts, he really lacked the religious temperament. “He himself,” says a recent biographer, “was too suspicious of the emotions to desire to inspire any enthusiasm with reference to his own heart.”243 This misstates the fact that his “Practical Reason” was but an abstraction of his own emotional predilection; but it remains true that that predilection was nearly free from the commoner forms of pious psychosis; and typical Christians have never found him satisfactory. “From my heart,” writes one of his first biographers, “I wish that Kant had not regarded the Christian religion merely as a necessity for the State, or as an institution to be tolerated for the sake of the weak (which now so many, following his example, do even in the pulpit), but had known that which is positive, improving, and blessed in Christianity.”244 He had in fact never kept up any theological study;245 and his plan of compromise had thus, like those of Spencer and Mill in a later day, a fatal unreality for all men who have discarded theology with a full knowledge of its structure, though it appeals very conveniently to those disposed to retain it as a means of popular influence. All his adaptations, therefore, failed to conciliate the mass of the orthodox; and even after the issue of the second Critique (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) he had been the subject of discussion among the reactionists.246 But that Critique, and the preface to the second edition of the first, were at bottom only pleas for a revised ethic, Kant’s concern with current religion being solely ethical;247 and the force of that concern led him at length, in what was schemed as a series of magazine articles,248 to expound his notion of religion in relation to morals. When he did so he aroused a resentment much more energetic than that felt by the older academics against his philosophy. The title of his complete treatise, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, is obviously framed to parry criticism; yet so drastic is its treatment of its problems that the College of Censors at Berlin under the new theological régime vetoed the second part. By the terms of the law as to the censorship, the publisher was entitled to know the reason for the decision; but on his asking for it he was informed that “another instruction was on hand, which the censor followed as his law, but whose contents he refused to make known.”249 Greatly incensed, Kant submitted the rejected article with the rest of his book to the theological faculty of his own university of Königsberg, asking them to decide in which faculty the censorship was properly vested. They referred the decision to the philosophical faculty, which duly proceeded to license the book (1793). As completed, it contained passages markedly hostile to the Church. His opponents in turn were now so enraged that they procured a royal cabinet order (October, 1794) charging him with “distorting and degrading many of the chief and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity,” and ordering all the instructors at the university not to lecture on the book.250 Such was the reward for a capitulation of philosophy to the philosophic ideals of the police.