Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/128

whose German, to use a comparison of Jean Paul Richter’s, is as limpid as a mountain lake that lies beneath gloomy cliffs, under a clear and frosty sky. One has even plunged down the tumultuous streams of Fichte’s eloquence, where the frail bark of a student’s understanding is indeed occasionally rather near to destruction, but whence a man still usually escapes with his wits. Now it is time to return to Kant. One hereupon falls upon the “Critique” with new zest, and finds that, as reading goes in a studious but rather busy and distracted life, one can at length read the book through in about three years, and can feel that thereafter he might do well to begin and read it again. After doing so, one lays it aside for a spell, and so returns afresh, from year to year, for a longer or shorter season, to the fascinating but baffling task. In Germany, where there has been a revival of interest in Kant, during the past twenty years, reading the “Critique” has come to take rank, so to speak, as one of the liberal professions. There are learned men who, in all appearance, do nothing else. The habit is dangerously fascinating. The Kant devotee never knows when to stop. When I studied in Germany as a young college graduate, some fifteen years ago, it was my fortune to meet one of the most learned and many-sided of the new philosophical doctors of the day, who was just then preparing for a docentship. He was a man who promised, as one might say, almost everything; who wrote and published essays of remarkable breadth and skill, and who was especially noticeable for his wide range of work. Some years later, it unhappily occurred to him to begin printing a commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” He planned the commentary for completion in four volumes octavo. Of these four he published, not long afterwards, the first, a volume of several hundred large pages, wherein he deals — with Kant’s introductory chapter. Since then my former acquaintance is lost.