The final volumes of the commentary have never appeared, although he has now been at work upon them more than ten years. How many volumes will really be needed to complete the task, only the “destroyer of delights and terminator of felicities,” whom the Arabian Nights’ tales always love to mention as they close, to wit, Death himself, can ever determine. The thorough student of Kant is, so to speak, a Tannhäuser, close shut in his Venusberg. You hunt for him fruitlessly in all the outer world. Worse than Tannhäuser he is, for you can never get him out. Pilgrims' choruses chant, and waiting Elizabeths mourn for him, in vain. As for me, I, as you perceive, am no reader of Kant, in the strict sense, at all. I won a doctor's degree, years since, in part by writing a course of lectures upon the “Critique.” I have since come to see that those lectures were founded upon a serious, I might say an entire, misinterpretation of Kant’s meaning. Since then I have repented, as you also observe, of this misinterpretation, and, as I might add, of several others. I love still to lecture to my college classes on Kant. I think that possibly I know a little about him. But then, after all, Kant, you see, is Kant; and the Lord made him, and many other wondrous works besides; and it takes time to find such things out.
You will understand therefore, at once, that I can have no intention of making clear, within the limits of a single lecture, a doctrine so subtle and involved as this. But then the justification of my undertaking in these lectures is wholly that I attempt, not to describe the philosophers and their opinions as the monuments of technical skill and of exhaustive research which they are, but to set forth to you something of the temperament which they embody. Kant shall be for us a character in a story, an attitude towards the spiritual concerns of humanity. As such you want to know him; as such only can I attempt here to describe him.
