The Secret of Swedenborg

Faith must reconcile herself to this perilous alternative, if she obstinately persist in making our natural morality supernatural by allowing it a truth irrespective of consciousness, or assigning it any objectivity beyond the evolution of human society or fel- lowship. It is not its own end, but a strict means to a higher or spiritual evolution of life in our nature; and they accordingly who persist in ignoring this truth must expect to fall intellectual- ly behind the time in which they live. Some concession hei-e is absolutely necessary to save the religious instinct. For men feel a growing obligation to co-ordinate the demands of freedom or personality with the limitations of science ; and since Kant's re- morseless criticism stops them off — under penalty of accepting his impracticable noumenal world — from postulating any longer an objective being answering to their subjective seeming, they must needs "svith his successors give the whole question of crea- tion the go-by, in qiiietly resolving the minor element of the equation into the major, man into God, or making the finite a mere transient experience of the infinite, by means of which that great unconsciousness attains to selfhood. For this is the sum of the Heo;elian dialectic, to confound existence with beinxr, or make identity no longer serve individuality, but absorb or swallow it up : so bringing back creation to intellectual chaos, which is naught.