“Ethics must not remain a lovely abstraction; it must be concretized into valid truth. At this point ethics joins forces with religion because ethics too has ultimately no other recourse but to hypothesize the idea of God: not for the personal redemption of the moral individual but as a guarantee for the eventual realization of morality in this world.”

— Hermann Cohen

Source: Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 122

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Hermann Cohen 10

German philosopher 1842–1918

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