IMMANUEL KANT

(1724-1804)

BY JOSIAH ROYCE

HE external events of the life of Immanuel Kant are neither numerous nor startling. He was born in Königsberg in East Prussia, in the year 1724, on the 22d of April. He died in his native place on the 12th of February, 1804. He never traveled beyond about a distance of sixty miles from the city; was never occupied except as scholar, private tutor, university official, and writer. He saw very little of the great world at any time. He was not celebrated, in any national sense, until he was nearly sixty years of age. His personal relations were for the most part, and until his later years, almost as restricted as his material circumstances. He was in all the early part of his life decidedly poor. By dint of very strict economy he acquired a moderate amount of property before his death, but he was never rich. He carefully avoided all roads to purely worldly position or power. Yet by dint of intellectual prowess, fortified by a profound moral earnestness,— although one somewhat coldly austere, he acquired an influence over the thought, first of his country, and then of Europe, which has been in many ways transforming. Amongst philosophical thinkers he stands in the first rank in the very small group of those philosophers who can be regarded as genuine originators. As an original thinker, in fact, he is the only modern philosopher who can be put beside Plato and Aristotle. Other modern thinkers have represented individual ideas of more or less independence and importance; Kant alone has the honor of having transformed by his work some of the most fundamental tendencies of modern speculation.

Of Kant the man, numerous characterizations have been given by his friends and admirers. Most of these accounts relate especially to his appearance and life in his later years. Of his youth we know much less. On his father's side Kant was of Scottish descent, his grandparents having emigrated from Scotland to East Prussia. Kant's parents were members of the Pietistic party in the Lutheran Church, and Kant's early education was thus under influences decidedly emotional in their religious character,- although the poverty, the hard labor, and the sterling character of his parents prevented the wasting

of time in devotional extravagances such as often characterized the Pietistic movement; and the philosopher later looked back upon his early training not only with a deep feeling of devotion, but with a genuine intellectual respect. The family was large. There were three sons and seven daughters. One of Kant's brothers later became a minister. One of the sisters survived the philosopher. But six of the children died young; and Immanuel himself inherited a delicate constitution which had a great deal to do, in later years, both with the sobriety and with the studious contemplativeness of his life's routine. At eight years of age, Kant attended the gymnasium called the Fredericianum, in Königsberg. Here he spent eight years and a half, much under the eye and the influence of the director of the gymnasium, Dr. F. A. Schultz,-Pietist, professor of theology, and pastor. Schultz was a scholarly, independent, and extremely active man, severe as a disciplinarian, stimulating as a thinker and worker. As Kant himself grew into youth, he formed literary ambitions, showed skill as a Latin writer and reader, but gave no evidences as yet of philosophical tendencies. He was not regarded as an especially promising boy: he is said to have been sensitive; he was certainly weak in body and small in stature. He entered the University in 1740; struggled with poverty and pedantry for about four years; was influenced by the philosophical teaching, especially of Martin Knutzen; and earned some necessary means as private tutor. A familiar anecdote of his university period relates that Kant occasionally was obliged to borrow clothing from his friends while his own was mending; and the story adds that on such occasions the friend might be obliged to stay at home himself. In any case, Kant's university life is described as one of few recreations and of pretty constant labor. Its result was seen at once after graduation, however, in the somewhat ambitious publication with which Kant's literary career opened. This was a study of the then current problem of the theory of kinetic forces,- or "living forces," as in the terminology of that time the title-page of this essay calls them. The essay was at once philosophical and quasi-mathematical. It was not in any positive sense an important contribution to the discussion; but it was obviously the work of a man in earnest. It was written in a spirit that combined in an attractive way ambition and modesty; and it contained in one passage a somewhat prophetic statement of the course that Kant had laid out for himself.

Kant's mother died in 1737. In 1746 his father followed. The years immediately subsequent to his university course, and to the publication of the foregoing treatise, were passed as private tutor; and it was at the beginning of this period that Kant traveled farthest from his native city. Our philosopher's work as tutor in private

families was of considerable advantage for his knowledge of the world, and brought him into contact with somewhat distinguished local magnates. Nine years in all were passed in this occupation.

career.

The year 1755 begins a new and important period of Kant's In this year he became tutor, or privat-docent, at the University, defended a dissertation upon metaphysics as he took his place in the University, and published a treatise on the 'Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.' In the latter essay he not only showed in various ways the most important features of his earlier methods of work, but had the honor of forestalling Lambert and Laplace in a number of suggestions, which have since become famous, relating to the evolution of the solar system. From this moment dates a longcontinued and extremely laborious effort towards self-development. As a university teacher, Kant was singularly successful. His range of lectures was large. Physical science, and especially physical geography, logic, and metaphysics were prominent among his topics. Affiliated at first with the then current highly formal and dogmatic Wolffian philosophy of the universities, Kant was from the outset an essentially independent expositor of doctrine, and soon became more and more an independent thinker. He united the necessarily somewhat pedantic method due to his own early training, with a marvelous humanity of spirit, and much brilliancy of expression as a lecturer. Some of his students listened with great enthusiasm. Herder, who attended his lectures in 1762 and 1763, never forgot, even in the midst of a bitter opposition which years later grew up in his mind towards Kant, the early influence of the master upon him. At the time or near it, the young Herder could hardly use expressions too enthusiastic concerning his master. Heavenly hours" he names the time spent in such instruction. Kant, he tells us, unites learning and depth in the finest fashion with something resembling "the humor of Tristram Shandy." He is a profound observer "in the pathology of our mind," he shows "a creative philosophical imagination," and has his own Socratic method of bringing everything into relation with man. In æsthetic as in ethical directions Herder finds his teacher equally great. Kant is "altogether a social observer, altogether a finished philosopher, a philosopher of humanity, and in this humane philosophy a German Shaftesbury."

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Some amongst Kant's writings belonging to this period show literary powers which make this enthusiastic characterization more intelligible than the writings of his later period would serve to do. Kant had unquestionably the power to become a popular writer of distinction, if not of extraordinary rank. But he was disposed to sacrifice his literary gifts for the sake of a cause which as the years went by became constantly dearer to him. For worldly distinction