IV.
Together with the German critics above cited, President Schurman, of Cornell University, in the Philosophical Review for March, 1898, also makes note of the inevitable return of Kant's mind to those ideas of the corpus mysticum, and of a mundus intelligibilis, which he tries in vain in his work on Swedenborg to laugh away.
Professor Schurman says:—
"The disparity between the reach and the grasp of his thought engendered in him a bitterness of spirit, the pathos of which is unknown to the mere sceptic. Hence the still sad music which he that hath an ear may hear beneath the banter and the persiflage of Swedenborg and Metaphysics.
"In the 'Dreams of a Spirit-Seer,' we have the critical part of the 'Right Method in Metaphysics.' Here Swedenborg serves as a whipping post for the Metaphysicians whom Kant scourges most unmercifully. Knowledge of the supra-sensible is put on the same level with arts of necromancy. In the one case it is a dream of sense; in the other a dream of reason—in both an illusion, (p. 146.)
"But though Kant, in virtue of the divorce between the theoretical and practical element of his thought, gibed at the metaphysical proof of those dear interests, which his heart was still open to shelter, it required some effort to overcome the rationalizing aspirations of early years, and the struggle occasionally found vent in a bitterness of feeling like the hatred of a deserted friend or the despair of a rejected lover."
No better illustration of this return of Kant's mind to the spiritual realities so vividly impressed upon him by
