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The aim of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft is essentially the same as that of the Treatise of Human Nature, by which indeed Kant was led to develop that "critical philosophy" with which his name and fame are indissolubly bound up: and, if the details of Kant's criticism differ from those of Hume, they coincide with them in their main result, which is the limitation of all knowledge of reality to the world of phenomena revealed to us by experience.

Kant answered the latter question in the affirmative, in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and thereby made one of the greatest advances ever effected in philosophy; though it must be confessed that the German philosopher's exposition of his views is so perplexed in style, so burdened with the weight of a cumbrous and uncouth scholasticism, that it is easy to confound the unessential parts of his system with those which are of profound importance.

On this point we cannot do better than quote some remarks from Kant's preface to the second edition of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft. But it must not be supposed that it was as easy for mathematics as it was for logic, where reason is concerned with itself alone, to find, or rather to build for itself, that royal road.

Because while the schoolboy reads how the Gods were like to men, only better, wiser, greater; how the Heroes are the children of the Gods, and the slayers of the monsters which devour the earth; how Athene taught men weaving, and Phoebus music, and Vulcan the cunning of the stithy; how the Gods took pity on the noble- hearted son of Danae, and lent him celestial arms and guided him over desert and ocean to fulfil his vow that boy is learning deep lessons of metaphysic, more in accordance with the reine vernunft, the pure reason whereby man perceives that which is moral, and spiritual, and eternal, than he would from all disquisitions about being and becoming, about actualities and potentialities, which ever tormented the weary brain of man.

"Aber diese Erkenntniss, die bloss auf Gegenstände der Erfahrung eingeschränkt ist, ist darum nicht alle von der Erfahrung entlehnt, sondern was sowohl die reinen Anschauungen, als die reinen Verstandesbegriffe betrifft, so sind sie Elemente der Erkenntniss die in uns a priori angetroffen werden." Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Elementarlehre, p. 135.

"There is no means whatever by which we can learn anything respecting the constitution of the soul, so far as regards the possibility of its separate existence." Kritik von den Paralogismen der reinen Vernunft. Fifth Edition, revised, 1846.

"So you're jealous of her, are you? You needn't be. She's gone. She tried to swallow the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and it disagreed with her and she died. "'Nur einmal doch maecht' ich dich sehen, Und sinken vor dir auf's Knie, Und sterbend zu dir sprechen, Madam, ich liebe Sie!" "What's that? Oh, what's that?" "That Madam is Heine." "My dearest Maurice " It was her turn for writing.

There is first the philosophical revolution which is commonly associated with the name of Kant. If we were to seek with arbitrary exactitude to fix a date for the beginning of this movement, this might be the year of the publication of his first great work, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in 1781.

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.

Fräulein Müller suggested that it was in just such weather as this that a well brought up young lady, a young lady with Vernunft and Anstand, should devote herself to the improvement of her mind. 'Let us read German this abscheulich afternoon, said the Fräulein. 'Suppose we go on with the "Sorrows of Werther." 'Werther was a fool, cried Mary; 'any book but that.