THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

KANT AND GERMAN IDEALISM 199
promise the immediate successor of the great King that he would write
no more. 5 ' 7 It was in appreciation of this freedom that Kant dedicated
the Critique to Zedlitz, Frederick's far-sighted and progressive Minister
of Education.
In 1 755 Kant began his work as private lecturer at the University of
Konigsberg. For fifteen years he was left in this lowly post; twice his
applications for a professorship were refused. At last, in 1770, he was
made professor of logic and metaphysics. After many years of experience
as a teacher, he wrote a text-book of pedagogy, of which he used to say
that it contained many excellent precepts, none of which he had ever
applied. Yet he was perhaps a better teacher than writer; and two
generations of students learned to love him. One of his practical principles
was to attend most to those pupils who were of middle ability; the dunces,
he said, were beyond all help, and the geniuses would help themselves.
Nobody expected him to startle the world with a new metaphysical
system; to startle anybody seemed the very last crime that this timid and
modest professor would commit. He himself had no expectations in that
line; at the age of forty-two he wrote: "I have the fortune to be a lovei
of metaphysics; but my mistress has shown me few favors as yet." He
spoke in those days of the "bottomless abyss of metaphysics," and of metaphysics
as "a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse," strewn with many
a philosophic wreck. 8 He could even attack the metaphysicians as those
who dwelt on the high towers of speculation, "where there is usually a
great deal of wind." 9 He did not foresee that the greatest of all meta*
physical tempests was to be of his own blowing.
During these quiet years his interests were rather physical than meta-
physical. He wrote on planets, earthquakes, fire, winds, ether, volcanoes,
geography, ethnology, and a hundred other things of that sort, not
usually confounded with metaphysics. His Theory of the Heavens (1755)
proposed something very similar to the nebular hypothesis of Laplace,
and attempted a mechanical explanation of all sidereal motion and development.
All the planets, Kant thought, have been or will be inhabited;
and those that are farthest from the sun, having had the longest
period of growth, have probably a higher species of intelligent organisms
than any yet produced on our planet. His Anthropology (put together in
1798 from the lectures of a life-time) suggested the possibility
of the
animal origin of man. Kant argued that if the human infant, in early
ages when man was still largely at the mercy of wild animals, had cried
as loudly upon entering the world as it does now, it would have been
found out and devoured by beasts of prey; that in all probability, therefore,
man was very different at first from what he had become under
n The World as Will and Idea, London, 1883; vol. ii, p. 133.
*In Paulsen, Immanuel Kart; New York, 1910; p. 82.
*Ibid.9 p. 56.