51�Թ�

It coloured the whole moral teaching of the time, and led the chief moralists to regard virtue simply as the highest kind of supersensual beauty.

It alone extends the narrow horizon of their thoughts, supplies the images of their dreams, allures them to the supersensual and the ideal.

Hence followed an ascetic morality, and a supersensual philosophy.

The transcendental phrases came over and over in book and conversation, "reason" and "understanding," "intuition," "necessary truths," "consciousness," and the rest that were used to describe the supersensual world and the faculties by which it was made visible.

His key-word was "Faith," by which he meant intuition, the power of gazing immediately on essential truth; an intellectual faculty which he finally called Reason, by which supersensual objects become visible, as material objects become visible to the physical eye; an inward sense, a spiritual eye, that "gives evidence of things not seen and substance to things hoped for;" a faculty of vision to which truths respecting God, Providence, Immortality, Freedom, the Moral Law, are palpably disclosed.