uld become a starting point for intellectual inquiry in the age as well as for the development of educational institutions offering a public forum and the means for individuals to achieve an education. Freedom is all that is required, says Kant, and he means here the freedom to use one's reason. Kant characterized the age in which he lived not as an enlightened age but as an age of enlightenment--it offered possibilities but had not yet seen their achievement:
As matters now stand it is still far from true that men are already capable of using their own reason in religious matters confidently and correctly without external guidance. Still, we have some obvious indications that the field of working toward the goal [of religious truth] is now being opened. What is more, the hindrances against general enlightenment or the emergence from self-imposed nonage are gradually diminishing.
Descartes originally asserted that there was only one thing which he could see as certain--his own existence. He later came to see that there were certain innate ideas in the mind, one of which was the idea of God. In his argument in the fifth Meditation, he stated that he could produce in his mind the idea of God just as he could the ideas of shape and number so that he should accord the idea of the existence of God the same certainty he accords mathematics:
Whatever proof and argument I use, it must always come back to this, that only the things I conceive clearly and distinctly have the power to c
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