It is not necessary, then, for men to meet their situation in the
cosmos by saying with Kant: We will act as though there were a God,
although we are always conscious that we have no real knowledge of
Him as an external being. In the light of the tragic circumstances of
humanity, this is demanding the impossible. No sane body of men will
ever get sufficient inspiration for life or find an adequate solution
for the problem of life by resting upon mere value judgments which
they propose, by an effort of will, to put in the place of genuine
reality judgments. Indeed, there is a truly scholastic naivete, a
sort of solemn and unconscious humor, in seriously proposing that
men should vitalize and consecrate their deepest purposes and most
difficult experiences by hypothesizing mere appearances and illusions.
Nor are we willing either to say with Santayana that all our sense of
the beauty of the world is merely pleasure objectified and that we can
infer no eternal Beauty from it. We are aware that there cannot be an
immediate knowledge of a reality distinct from ourselves, that all
our knowledge must be, in the nature of the case, an idea, a mental
representation, that we can never know the Thing Itself. But if we
believe, as we logically and reasonably may, that our subjective ideas
are formed under the influence of objects unknown but without us,
produced by stimuli, real, if not perceived apart from our own
consciousness, then we may say that what we have is a mediate or
representative knowledge not only of an Eternal Being but formed under
the influence of that Being.
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