TRUTH
into a causal chain of events. Kant essentially devised a way for these two trains to run in tandem. On the other hand, this solution also represented a victory on another front, because it found a way to endorse the unbroken rule of Newtonian determinism while still safeguarding the moral law: the necessary connec tions established by physics have to do with the phenomenal world, while freedom and the moral law belong to the realm of 'things in themselves'. While it may be that from an aerial view these two trains (phys ics and ethics, determinism and freedom) appear to be on a collision path, a view from the ground shows they are running on two different levels ('phenomenal' and 'noumenal') and will pass each other by without incident. Of course, there is no way for Kant to know that freedom actually does belong to 'things in themselves', because the definition of 'things in themselves' is that we do not know anything about them. But he cleared the way for having a certain philosophical faith in free- _ dom and the moral law, and he summed this up in a single sentence, in which the nucleus of his entire phil osophy is contained: 'I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.'23 When he says 'deny', he means to confine knowledge to appearances, to deny that knowledge gains access to ultimate reality. By 'faith' he means a philosophical faith that in the sphere of ultimate reality we have real freedom; he does not mean the faith 134
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS CRITICS
of a confessional religion like the Prussian Lutheran Church. He has found it necessary to restrict the laws of physics to the phenomenal sphere (appearances) in order to make room for a purely rational faith in the moral law, in the sphere of things in themselves (real ity). In other words, for Kant the trains that run on the rails of physics are never permitted to jump the tracks and overrun the lands of freedom. It needs to be added, as Kant's contemporary and science-minded critics have pointed out, that Kant substantially undid the real Copernican Revolution. Copernicus injured our former pride in being the centre of the universe, but Kant reinstated the cen trality of our mind in reality by making the mind the author of the intelligible (universal, necessary) fea tures of reality, which led to a wave of German Idealist metaphysics. To his critics, I<ant reversed a revolution and spawned a wariness about the physical sciences among continental philosophers that has lasted to this day. Similarly, while Kant was speaking of a rational and not a religious faith, his famous motto nonetheless works very well for the faithful, who can use it to keep religious faith safe from science. They recast Kant's distinction between phenomena and things in themselves into a distinction between the way the world is known by us and the way the world is known by God. As the scientists themselves will be the first to admit, they do not know everything, and these new Kantians jump into that gap. They say 135