indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure--an
ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old
conception of the soul, under the guise of a criticism of the subject
and predicate conception--that is to say, an ATTENTAT on the
fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy,
as epistemological skepticism, is secretly or openly ANTI-CHRISTIAN,
although (for keener ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious.
Formerly, in effect, one believed in "the soul" as one believed in
grammar and the grammatical subject: one said, "I" is the condition,
"think" is the predicate and is conditioned--to think is an activity for
which one MUST suppose a subject as cause. The attempt was then made,
with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get out
of this net,--to see if the opposite was not perhaps true: "think" the
condition, and "I" the conditioned; "I," therefore, only a synthesis
which has been MADE by thinking itself. KANT really wished to prove
that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved--nor
the object either: the possibility of an APPARENT EXISTENCE of the
subject, and therefore of "the soul," may not always have been strange
to him,--the thought which once had an immense power on earth as the
Vedanta philosophy.