think, would take this form: 'If the kind of sensation whereby transcendental objects and those at present entirely unknown appear as a material world should cease, still all vision would not thereby cease, and it would be quite possible that even the same unknown objects should continue, although not indeed under the aspects of bodies, but still continue to be knowable to the thinking subject.'"
It is true he speaks altogether in the critical manner regarding these views, insisting that dogmatically nothing can be adduced either for or against them.
[Compare "Lecture on the Philosophy of Religious Doctrine," p. 106: "Of this immediate vision of the understanding have we as yet no notion: but whether the departed soul, as intelligence, instead of the sensuous vision, may not obtain some such vision, wherein, in the Ideas of God, he may behold the things in themselves, cannot be denied, neither can it be proved."]
Something similar, and reminding one of the Lectures, but still of Swedenborg, we find in the section (of the "Paralogisms of the Pure Reason") on the description of the Pure Reason in regard to Hypothesis. There we read (p. 592) that, "one may use as a weapon against materialism the argument that the separation from the body is the end of our sense knowledge and the beginning of our intellectual knowledge. The body helps the sensual and animal part, but hinders the spiritual part of our nature. And against other criticisms of the doctrine of Immortality one may adduce the transcendental hypothesis:—
"All life is essentially only intellectual and not subject to time changes, neither beginning with birth nor ending with death. This world's life is only an appearance, a sensuous image of the pure spiritual life, and the whole world of sense only a picture swimming before our present knowing faculty like a dream, and having no reality in itself. For if we should see things and ourselves as they are we would see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures with which our entire real relation neither began at birth nor ended with the body's death."
One sees here Kant's strong inclination to these views and how easy it is to establish them by his distinguishing of the appearance from the thing in itself, and on his acceptance of a world of rational beings (mundus intelligibilis) as a kingdom of ends to be thought of
