When Immanuel Kant became professor at Königsberg he had already been convinced by Hume and the philosophes that reason alone could give no adequate defense of even the fundamentals of the Christian theology. In Rousseau he found a way to save those fundamentals: deny the validity of reason in the suprasensible world; affirm the independence of mind, the primacy of will, and the absoluteness of innate conscience; and deduce the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God from man’s feeling of unconditional obligation to the moral law.
