TWO WORKS ON KANT.*" IT is a remarkable fact that,

until quite recently, we have had no biography of Kant in the English language. The great

ii.s\sthil German metaphysician has exercised a most powerful influence on English thought. The works of Sir W. Hamilton, Dean # Manael, and Mr. Herbert Spencer show distinct traces of this ‘ uence, and modern Agnosticism in this country is, perhaps in some degree, the outcome of his speculative teaching. It seems strange, then, that no one should hitherto have undertaken to give us some knowledge of the man himself. Works on Kant there are in abundance, and Professor Caird has written upon • The Life of Dumont:4 Kant. By J. H. W. Stuckenberg, D.D., late Professor in Wittenberg College, Ohio. London : Macmillan and Co. 1892. Kant. By William Wallace, M.A., LL.D., Fellow and Tutor of Merton College Oxford. Edinburgh and London : William Blackwood. 1N2.

his philosophy better, perhaps, than any one else, German or English. But his biography was a desideratum, and we are glad to see that Professor Stuckenberg has at last supplied the want. We may at once say that he has presented the public with a valuable and interesting work, written in the most con- scientious spirit, and evidently the result of much labour and. research. He speaks pathetically in his preface of the difficul- ties he has had to cope with, and of the scant information which he gained at times, after greatest pains taken. "One may glean long," he says, "and on many a field, and as the

result of his labours bring home only a light sheaf, and even that nearly all straw." However, the net result of his glean- ings is eminently satisfactory, and the book before us will, we are sure, be read with interest and real profit by every student of Kant's philosophy. The interest of the biography is mainly psychological. It is rather as the history of the peculiarities and progress of Kant's mind, of his habits and character, than as a narrative of events, that it is valuable. Kant's life was, indeed, uneventful, and during many years of his professor- ship at Konigsberg, the history of one week, or even of one day, is the history of the whole year. We shall here only re- produce one or two remarkable facts in his mental constitution,

which may throw light upon the character and writings of the man.

Professor Stuckenberg most justly says that it is unfair to judge Kant by the Sritik der ninon, Veranaft alone. The moral element was intensely strong in his character, and exercised a supreme influence over his view of life as a whole. Although his intellect was cold and critical in analysis, he was frequently aroused to great enthusiasm, when speaking of moral or religious questions. And certainly at one part of his life he by no means regarded this habit as an amiable weakness, but rather looked upon those who thought it unreasonable, as persons of small mind and mean understanding. "Whoever is more powerfully inspired by a moral emotion as a principle, than others, on account of their cold and often ignoble heart, are able to appreciate, is, in their estimation, an enthusiast," he writes with contempt. Jackman, in his reminiscences of Kant, gives the following account of his experience in the matter :—

"How often did Kant speak with rapture of God's wisdom, good- ness, and power, when conversing with his friends on the structure of the world ? How often he spoke touchingly on the blessedness of a future life ! And here the heart both of the philosopher and the man spoke, giving indubitable testimony of his emotions and honest convictions. One such conversation on astronomy, daring which Kant was constantly inspired by his. theme, was not merely enough to convince every one who heard him that he believed in God and Providence, but it would also have changed an Atheist into a Believer."

The absolute regularity of the philosopher's life, his habits of study, his powers of acquisition, his sense of humour, his ex- treme sensitiveness, the slowness with which he formed his views, and the tenacity with which he adhered to them, his simplicity of character, his powers of conversation, his complete and un- intermittent absorption in his own thoughts,—these and many other peculiarities are dwelt upon and illustrated by Professor Stuckenberg. Kant had a great contempt for mere knowledge of facts, if it was not systematised and impregnated with philo- sophy. This habit of mind led him by degrees to an extra- ordinary overestimate of the value of a priori argument, which was utterly unreasonable, and would surprise us in a man of his exceedingly cautious and philosophical temper, did we not remember how common a penalty of genius is intellectual eccentricity. We think it worth while to extract at length an instance of this remarkable phenomenon :—

"He had come to the conclusion in 1798 that Napoleon could not have the intention of landing in Egypt, but that while he pretended to be fitting out an expedition against that country, he was really preparing to enter Portugal. It was his opinion that England would feel most keenly the capture of Portugal by the French, owing to the important commercial relations between those two countries. So satisfactorily had he demonstrated to himself this supposed stratagem of Napoleon, that even after the French had landed in Egypt and the Government had announced the fact to all Europe, he still asserted that the expedition was against Portugal, and that the announce- ment to the contrary was only a pretext to mislead the English."

It may be new to some, as it was to the present writer, that Kant was the first thinker to whom it occurred that the universe, as it exists at present, might have been evolved by the known laws of attraction and repulsion from a

nebulous mass. In other words, he was the originator of what is known as the nebular theory, although Lam- bert, who propounded the same hypothesis some years later in his Cosmological Letters, did so, we believe, with- out any previous acquaintance with .Kant's work, which ap- peared in 1755, and was entitled, General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens; or, an Essay on the Constitution and Mechanical Origin, of the Whole Universe, discussed according to Newtonian Principles.

Mr. Wallace's little book on Kant, which is one of Professor Knight's useful series of "Philosophical Classics for English Readers," seems to us a work of unequal merit. He says, in his preface, that it "has been partly shaped by the desire not to tread, more than was inevitable, on ground which" recent English writers on Kant "had already occupied with greater plenitude ;" and it is doubtless to this desire that we are in- debted for the very interesting reszon4 of the first part of the Eritik der Urtheilskraft, given in the thirteenth chapter. Kant's analysis of the sense of beauty and sublimity is unknown to many who are familiar enough with his Critique of Pure Beason and his ethical works. Among the many psychological facts noted by the philosopher in this connection, is one which has always struck us as curious and interesting, and is, if we re- member rightly, spoken of by Mr. Raskin, in his recently- published Arrows of the Chace. Whence comes it that a painting, if perfectly faithful to nature, possesses for us, in many cases, extreme beauty, when the original is common-place and uninteresting ? A lover of art will go into an ecstasy of admiration over a well-painted hand. He will note the perfection of the flesh-tint, the accuracy with which each vein is traced, the grace of every curve, and will say, as the highest praise he can give, that it seems like a real human hand, standing out from the canvas. But, after all, it is diffi- cult to explain wherein its especial beauty lies. No doubt, the skill of the artist who can note so accurately and reproduce the exact features and details in the appearance of a hand, excites marvel and admiration. But in what, especially, consists the beauty of the picture, when the highest praise we can give it is that it closely resembles a human hand? There is, doubtless, a certain beauty in the human hand, but it would seem to fall far short of and to differ from that unique artistic beauty, which we perceive in the picture. If one who was gazing at the latter with delight were suddenly told that it was no picture, but, like Peg Woffington's portrait, a real hand inserted through a hole in the canvas, half its charm would be gone. And yet the curves, veins, and flesh- tint would be not one whit less perfect. We are inclined to think that the true explanation of this is somewhat similar to a parallel phenomenon in music. A beautiful melody, if heard constantly, ceases to arouse any emotion. Oar sense of the beautiful in its regard becomes dulled. But we sometimes find that if it is performed in an unaccustomed way—for instance, by an entirely new combination of instruments—our faculties become once more stimulated by this element of freshness, and our enjoyment of it is as keen as ever. This very thing hap- pened recently to the present writer, who heard a beautiful air by Mozart, whose charm he had deemed destroyed for ever by the agency of repeated barrel-organ performances, executed on a mandolin and guitar by Swiss peasants. And just as the novelty and cleverness of the performance aroused, in this case, a keen sense of the beauty of the piece, so, we suggest, is a sense of the beauty of the human hand, which has been lost on account of our familiarity with it, aroused by the stimulus given to him who notes with admiration the wondrous skill of the artist. The hand itself really possesses all the beauty of the picture, and doubtless Adam admired it as much in nature as we do in art. But to us, it is too familiar in nature to be appreciated, without some especial stimulus given to our faculties. This we take to have been Kant's view, when he said, with almost epigrammatic terseness, "Nature was found beautiful, when it looked at the same time as if it were Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious that it is Art, and it yet appears to us as if it were Nature."

Kant's analysis of "the Sublime" is interesting and sugges- tive, and deserves to be reproduced. Mr. Wallace thus sum- marises it :—

" An object is styled sublime, when the perception of it

stimulates the imagination to grasp in one single picture the mass of details, and imagination falls short of the task ; or when the feeling of its overwhelming power, as compared with our physical weakness, suggests immediately, by way of counterpoise, the thought that there is in us somewhat which all the efforts of physical force are powerless to subdue. In both cases (Kant distinguishes them as the mathe- matical and the dynamical sublime), the strange pleasure which we take in what is too great for imagination to apprehend as a unity, or too powerful for the unchecked buoyancy of flesh and blood to feel at ease in its presence, is due to the revelation that we have a higher vocation and a nobler humanity, which commands the imagination by a vague idea, and keeps us tranquil amid the grandears of Nature."

This last passage recalls the German philosopher's well-known saying, which has thus been rendered :—

"Two things there are that fill the mind with awe,

The starry heavens, and our sense of law ;"

and this leads us to speak of that most remarkable element in Kant's philosophy,—the Categorical Imperative. If Kant, as some say, heralded Agnosticism by the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, he certainly suggested also the antidote to modem Agnostic principles in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.

Man's "sense of law" is daily becoming more unmis- takably the rallying-point of those who oppose the Evolu- tion psychology. The unique character of conscience and of the sense of duty, may be called the central doctrine of Christian Ethics. If this is disproved, their distinctive characteristic is gone; and where this is acknowledged, the author of the Moral Law cannot be ignored or passed over. Two of the greatest Christian philosophers of the last century or the present, Bishop Butler and Cardinal Newman, insist on no prin- ciple more strongly than on this,—that our sense of moral obligation is the most important channel whereby the exist- ence of a personal God becomes known to the individual mind. On this subject Kant is very explicit, and Mr. Wallace

gives an excellent summary of his teaching. The hypothetical imperative—that which a man is warned to do, if he desires to be happy—is contrasted with the categorical imperative of true morality, which commands without condition, and refuses to be

explained or analysed into anything else than the absolute law of our moral nature, irrespective of consequences, and complete in itself :—

" To ask why we ought to obey the moral law is absurd, because any explanation would only destroy the morality of the law. We cannot comprehend the practical, unconditional necessity of the moral imperative ; we can only comprehend its incomprehen- sibility. But that unaccountability has important consequences. As imperative, it seems to be a stranger and an outsider ; as moral, it must be within us. The recognition of the authority of the moral law is known as the sense of duty, and in duty there is set before us a necessitation,—we feel that we are obliged to act in such and such a manner. And this sense of sub- jection to law, of limitation—this presentation of the moral idea as an imperative, and of the realisation of that idea as duty—is the peculiarity, according to Kant, of morality as human."

We are inclined to think that the two subjects of which we have spoken are those most successfully handled by Mr. Wallace.

The biography is not uninteresting, although it is, of course, from its limited dimensions, less attractive than the other one which we have noticed, by Professor Stuckenberg. Where, we think, he fails is in his account of the Kritik der rein,en Vernunft, which, whether or no it is substantially correct, is difficult and heavy reading. The value of a work of the scope and dimensions of Mr. Wallace's depends much, as it seems to us, upon the clearness of its thought and expression. This, indeed, is the only quality which would render it preferable to a translation. The writer is supposed to have digested Kant, and to present him to us in a simplified form. Mr. Wallace has not, we think, always succeeded in doing this ; and we doubt, in some instances, whether he has clearly apprehended his own thought. He would have been all the better for some of Mr. Huxley's "ineradicable tendency to make things clear," which

renders that writer's Life of Hume—a book of the same scope and aim as the present—so lucid and interesting. However,

no doubt the obscurity of Kant's own style has much to answer for in this respect.