For if modern Pantheism be indebted to Spinoza for its _substance_, it is equally indebted to Kant for its _form_; and no intelligible account can be given of the phases which it has successively assumed, without reference to the powerful influence which his Philosophy, in one or other of its constituent elements, has exerted on all his successors in the same field of inquiry.
The Philosophy of Kant has a most important bearing on the whole question as to the validity of the natural evidence for the being and perfections of God.

We shall confine our attention to those parts of his system which give rise to the speculations that have issued in the recent theories of Ideal or Spiritual Pantheism.
In attempting to explain the nature and origin of the whole system of human knowledge, Kant divides our intellectual being into _three_ distinct faculties,--sensation, understanding, and reason.

He supposes that from sensation we derive the whole _matter_ of our knowledge; that from the understanding we derive its _form_, or the manner in which it is conceived of by us; and that from reason we derive certain general or abstract notions, which are highly useful, since they give a systematic unity to human thought, but which have no _objective validity_, that is, either no reality in nature that corresponds to them, or none, at least, that can be scientifically demonstrated.

From this fundamental principle of his system it follows, that the only part of our knowledge which has any objective reality is that which is derived from our sense-perceptions, all else being purely _formal or subjective_, and arising solely from the laws of our own mental nature, which determine us to conceive of things in a particular way; and that even that part of our knowledge which is derived from sense-perception is purely phenomenal, since we know nothing of any object around us beyond the bare fact that it exists, and that it appears to us to be as our senses represent it.

Hence the _skeptical_ tendency of Kant's speculations, in so far as the scientific certainty of our knowledge is concerned.