THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

CHAPTER VI
Immanuel Kant and German Idealism
I. ROADS TO KANT
NEVER has a system of thought so dominated an epoch as the philosophy
of Immanuel Kant dominated the thought of the nineteenth century. After
almost three-score years of quiet and secluded development, the uncanny
Scot of Konigsberg roused the world from its "dogmatic slumber/ 5
in
I73i 3 with his famous Critique of Pure Reason; and from that year to our
own the ''critical philosophy"
has ruled the speculative
roost of Europe. The
philosophy of Schopenhauer rose to brief power on the romantic wave that
broke in 1848: the theory of evolution swept everything before it after
1850; and the exhilarating iconoclasm of Nietzsche won the center of the
philosophic stage as the century came to a close. But these were secondary
and surface developments; underneath them the strong and steady current
Df the Kantian movement flowed on, always wider and deeper; until today
its essential theorems are the axioms of all mature philosophy. Nietzsche
1
takes Kant for granted, and passes on; Schopenhauer calls the Critique
5
"the most important work in German literature/ and considers any man a
child until he has understood Kant; 2
Spencer could not understand Kant,
and for precisely
that reason, fell perhaps, a little short of the fullest
philosophic stature. To adapt Hegel's phrase about Spinoza:
to be a
philosopher,
one must first have been a Kantian.
Therefore let us become Kantians at once. But it cannot be done at
once.j apparently; for in philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between
two is points a line.
straight Kant is the last person in the world
whom we should read on Kant. Our is like
philosopher and unlike Je-
hovah; he speaks through clouds,
but without the illumination of the
would have
lightning-flash* He disdains examples and the concrete; they
made his
3
book too long, he argued. (So abbreviated, it contains some
800 pages) . Only professional philosophers were expected to read him;
and these would not need illustrations. Yet when Kant gave the MS. of
the Critique to his friend Herz, a man much versed in speculation, Herz
*Tke Will to Power, vol. ii, part I.
*The World as Will and Idea., London, 1883; vol. ii, p. 30.
*The Critique of Pure Reason, London, 1881; vol. ii, p, xxvii. All subsequent
references are to volume two.