The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

question, therefore, between the Christian theological idealist and the
Christian cosmo-thetical idealist is, really, whether God operates through
phenomena, grouped simply by His causative will according to fixed laws,
or, on the other hand, through objective substances in which attributes
actually inhere; whether He operates upon our mind in producing
impressions we connect with a supposed external world "immediately" or
"mediately." It has been said by great philosophers, who rejected the
former species of idealism, that though no man can believe it, no man can
confute it; and it is claimed by its advocates that it never has been confuted.
That no man can believe it, is certainly not true. We have the same
evidence that confessedly deep thinkers have believed it that we have that
men believe any other doctrine. But if the deepest thinking of some of the
deepest thinkers can reach such a theory, where shall we place the
crudities of the popular philosophy or want of philosophy? How little can
it settle by its speculations.
Transcendental Idealism,--Kant.
The school of "transcendental idealism," if it be proper to call it
"idealism" at all, has its greatest modern representative in Kant and it is
said, "Kant cannot, strictly speaking, be called an idealist, inasmuch as he
accepts objects outside of the Ego, which furnish the material for ideas, a
material to which the Ego, in accordance with primary laws, merely gives
form.” 525 The weakness of Kant's system was its arbitrary separation
between the practical and the speculative. He held that the data of
perception are valid in the practical sphere both of thought and action, but
cannot be accepted as proven, and therefore valid, in the sphere of
speculation. The practical here reached a result which transcended the
powers of the speculative. To the speculative it was not, indeed, disproven,
but only non-proven; yet, as non-proven, it made his system one which
admitted, on one side, the speculative possibility of the purest idealism,
while on the other, at the sacrifice of internal consistency, he reached for
himself a hypothetical realism, or cosmo-thetical idealism. All speculative
thinking in Germany since has, more or less, turned upon the vindication
525 Fürtmaier: Philosoph. Real Lexicon. Augsburg, 1854, Idealismus.