Kant is more than once profoundly inconsistent with the extreme subjectivism of his theory of ideas as when he says in the Practical Reason:  “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them:  the starry heavens above and the moral law within."[5] Again he remarks, “The belief in a great and wise Author of the world has been supported entirely by the wonderful beauty, order and providence, everywhere displayed in nature."[6] Here the objective reality both of what is presented to our senses and what is conceived of in the mind, is, as though unconsciously, taken for granted.  Thus while he contends for a practical theism, the very basis of his interest still rests in the conviction of a Being external to us and existing independent of our thought.

[Footnote 5:  The Critique of Practical Reason (tr.  T.K.  Abbott), p. 260.]

[Footnote 6:  The Critique of Pure Reason, p. 702.]

But his intention of making right conduct the essence of religion is typical of the limits of humanistic interests and perceptions.  In making his division of reason into the theoretical and the practical, it is to the latter realm that he assigns morality and religion.  Clearly this is genuine rationalism.  I am not forgetting Kant’s great religious contribution.  He was the son of devout German pietists and saturated in the literature of the Old Testament.  It is to Amos, who may justly be called his spiritual father, that he owes the moral absoluteness of his categorical imperative, the reading of history as a moral order.  He was following Amos when he took God out of the physical and put Him into the moral sphere and interpreted Him in the terms of purpose.  But the doctrine of The Critique of Practical Reason is intended to negate those transcendent elements generally believed to be the distinctive portions of religion.  God is not known to us as an objective being, an entity without ourselves.  He is an idea, a belief, which gives meaning to our ethical life, a subjective necessity.  He is a postulate of the moral will.  To quote Professor McGiffert again:  “We do not get God from the universe, we give Him to the universe.  We read significance and moral purpose into it.  We assume God, not to account for the world, but for the subjective need of realizing our highest good....  Religion becomes a creative act of the moral will just as knowledge is a creative act of the understanding."[7] Thus there are no ultimate values; at least we can know nothing of them; we have nothing to look to which is objective and changeless.  The absolutism of the Categorical Imperative is a subjective one, bounded by ourselves, formed of our substance.  Religion is not discovered, but self-created, a sort of sublime expediency.  It can carry, then, no confident assertion as to the meaning and destiny of the universe as a whole.

[Footnote 7:  H.T.R., vol.  I, no. 1, p. 18.]