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