United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If we may judge by the specimens given by Reicke in the Altpreussische Monatsschrift, 1882-84, and by Krause himself, the promised publication of a manuscript of Kant's last years, now in possession of the Hamburg pastor, Albrecht Krause, and which discusses the transition from the metaphysical elements of natural science to physics, will hardly meet the expectations which some have cherished concerning it.
That may be all very well for Madame de Netteville, but how does such teaching look in the light of Kant's solemn injunction: "Act so that thy conduct may become a law unto all men"? Could any one seriously propose to erect feeling into a supreme criterion whereby to judge of the conduct of life?
This general decline in Kant's powers, active and passive, gradually brought about a revolution in his habits of life. Heretofore, as I have already mentioned, he went to bed at ten, and rose a little before five. The latter practice he still observed, but not the other. In 1802 he retired as early as nine, and afterwards still earlier.
Kant's mode of dealing with the doctrine of necessity is very singular. That the phenomena of the mind follow fixed relations of cause and effect is, to him, as unquestionable as it is to Hume. But then there is the Ding an sich, the Noumenon, or Kantian equivalent for the substance of the soul.
The event showed that I was right; for a funeral such as Kant's, one so solemn and so magnificent, the city of Koenigsberg has never witnessed before or since. The public journals, and separate accounts in pamphlets, etc., have given so minute an account of its details, that I shall here notice only the heads of the ceremony.
Kant's eloquent eulogy of good will appeals to one of our noblest impulses; but that impulse is as much in need of justification to the reason as any other, and it is only one of a number of equally healthy and justifiable natural preferences. Moreover, it has a thin, precarious existence in most of us at best, and needs all the encouragement it can get.
It is a notion of that object, although we may be assured that we could have no such notion were there no object. Equally, the notion is what it is because the subject is what it is. We can never get outside the processes of our own thought. We cannot know the thing as it is, the Ding-an-sich, in Kant's phrase. We know only that there must be a 'thing in itself. Fichte asked, Why?
Kant was somewhat fastidious in matters of pronunciation; and this man had a great facility in catching the true sound of Latin words, the titles of books, and the names or designations of Kant's friends: not one of which accomplishments could Lampe, the most insufferable of blockheads, ever attain to.
In 1781, he published his great work, the Critik der Reinen Vernunft, or Investigation of the Pure Reason. On February 12, 1804, he died. These are the great epochs of Kant's life.
Had Kant's criticism amounted simply to such a confession of the tentative, practical, and hypothetical nature of human reason, it would have been wholly acceptable to the wise; and its appeal to faith would have been nothing but an expression of natural vitality and courage, just as its criticism of knowledge would have been nothing but a better acquaintance with self.
Word Of The Day