The one starts with effects evident to the senses and leads to the suprasensible, to the First Cause; the other follows the reverse course.

Toward metaphysics, as an alleged science of the suprasensible, he takes up an entirely negative attitude.

Reality slips away from both these systemsthey are the only consistent ones there arematerial reality escaping from the former and suprasensible reality from the latter; and this must be so, because reality, of whatever kind it be, cannot be known, but only believed and felt.

Reason and freedom are the same: the former is theoretical, the latter practical elevation to the suprasensible.

If the claim of empiricism is true, that all our concepts arise from perception, then not only the science of the suprasensible, which it denies, but also the science of the objects of experience, about which it concerns itself, is impossible.

In making the unperceivable and suprasensible (the real nature of things, the totality of the world, the Deity, and immortality) the special object of philosophy, rationalism looked on the understanding as a faculty of knowledge by which objects are given.

It is true that concepts of the suprasensible exist, but nothing can be known through them, there is nothing intuitively given to be subsumed under them.

The empirical phase reaches its skeptical termination in the satire Dreams of a Ghost-seer explained by the Dreams of Metaphysics, 1766, which pours out its ingenious sarcasm impartially on spiritualism and on the assumed knowledge of the suprasensible.

All this is absent in the third science, metaphysics, as science of the suprasensible, and to its great disadvantage.

For even if a "knowledge" of the suprasensible is denied to us, yet "practical" grounds are not wanting for a sufficiently certain "conviction" concerning God, freedom, and immortality.

Heretofore, when the metaphysical method had been adopted, the object had been the suprasensible; and when knowledge had been made the object of investigation, the method followed had been empirical, psychological.

Kant's judgment is, also, no more stable concerning the value of the knowledge of the suprasensible, which is denied to us.

The schematism makes the immanent use of the categories, and thus a metaphysics of phenomena, possible, but the transcendent use of them, and consequently the metaphysics of the suprasensible, impossible.

Though the concepts of the understanding possess a cognitive value in the sphere of phenomena alone, the hope still remains of gaining an entrance into the suprasensible sphere through the concepts of reason.

Freedom is not a dogmatic proposition of theoretical reason, but a postulate of practical reason; and the latter holds the primacy over the former to this extent, that it can require the former to show that certain transcendent Ideas of the suprasensible, which are most intimately connected with moral obligation, are compatible with the principles of the understanding.

That, therefore, which the Dialectic recognized as possible is in the Ethics shown to be real: Whoever seeks to fulfill his moral destinyand this is the duty of every manmust not doubt concerning the conditions of its possible fulfillment, must, in spite of their incomprehensibility, believe in freedom and a suprasensible world.

Fries and Beneke declare that a speculative knowledge of the suprasensible is impossible, and seek to base philosophy on empirical psychology; to the monism (panlogism) of the idealists Herbart opposes a pluralism, to their philosophy of becoming, a philosophy of being; Schopenhauer rejects their optimism, denying rationality to the world and the world-ground.

We are impelled to the assumption of a suprasensible, an unconditioned, a providence, on the one hand, by the desire for a unitary conclusion for our fragmentary knowledge of the world; and, on the other, by moral need, by our unsatisfied longing after the good.

Besides this true, suprasensible world of Ideas, which is elevated above space, time, motion, change, and development, and which has not arisen by creation or a process of production, there exists for man, but only for himman is formally perfect, it is true, but materially imperfect (since he represents the real from a limited standpoint)a sensuous world of phenomena as the sphere of his activity.

To this he himself belongs, and in it he is spontaneously to develop the suprasensible content which is eternally given him (i.e., his true nature), namely, to raise it from the merely potential condition of obscure presentiment to clear, conscious actuality.

Freedom is the power to overcome our imperfection by means of our true nature, to realize our suprasensible capacities, to become for ourselves what we are in ourselves (in God).

The biblical narratives are, in great part, not history (this has been the common error alike of the super-naturalistic and of the rationalistic interpreters), but myths, that is, suprasensible facts presented in the form of history and in symbolic language.

But science is able to prove this much, that the belief in a suprasensible world, in the indestructibility of that which alone has worth, and in the freedom of the intelligible character, which the will demands, is not scientifically impossible.

As physics has discarded transcendent causes and learned how to get along with immanent causes, so ethics also must endeavor to establish the worth of moral good without excursions into the suprasensible.

Metaphysics, as the theory of the a priori conditions of experience, is raised to the rank of a science, while the suprasensible is removed from the region of proof and refutation and based upon the rock of moral will.