of the recent philosophical expositors of the meaning of natural science. Such writers may or may not recognize their Kantian affiliations; but their position is one whose ontology is almost altogether Kantian, whatever may be their Psychology or their Theory of Knowledge. And such theories are so important for the whole position of religious thought, especially in its relations to scientific thought, that our future fortunes in this research largely depend upon seeing how we are related to this characteristic modern opinion.
Kant was, by early training, a realist. God, nature, the soul, are all in his early works, realities whose independence of even the truest and most certain external thoughts about them is for him obvious. As Kant grew critical, he long pondered over the problems of Time and of Space, and, in 1769, largely in consequence of the discovery of what he took to be fundamentally contradictory characters in space and in time, he came to deny that these so-called forms of our experience can be valid for “Objects as they are in themselves.” Later Kant became still more critical, and questioned how, if the Noumena, or objects as they are in themselves, are so remote as his new theory now maintained from our empirical world of time and space phenomena, those real things, independent as they are of our understandings, can be known to us at all. The consequence of this new doubt, and of an interest in nevertheless maintaining the genuine validity of the mathematical and empirical sciences, was the theory expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781.
In this theory, Kant comes definitely not only to recog-
