II.
The man Kant is an old subject for literary portraiture. It is hard to say anything in the least new about him. He was born in 1724, in the city of Königsberg, in the province of East Prussia, and never once in his life traveled beyond that province. His family was poor; his father was of Scotch descent, and was a saddler, and in religion a pietist. Both Kant’s parents lived a narrow and glowing religious life, cheerful, harmonious, and, in a worldly sense, dispassionate. At school Kant attracted such attention that a university course of study followed, in Königsberg, of course, and this led him to an academic career. At the outset of his literary work Kant is a curious mixture of the pedant, the many-sided student, the young man of literary skill, and the independent investigator. His earliest essay was in philosophical physics, and was in more senses than one a failure. In 1755, he published, however, a remarkable paper on the “General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,” wherein he anticipated the essential features of the nebular hypothesis which Laplace afterwards developed. Up to this time he had been a private tutor. Thenceforth he lectured as privat-docent at the university until his appointment as professor in 1770. Promotion, as one sees, was thereabouts slow, and Kant was perhaps at first overlooked by higher officials, whom he never sought to please. During these earlier years he was a man of considerable literary skill, but in philosophy was still under the influence of the reigning dogmatic school. The poet Herder, who heard him as docent, speaks very highly of his power in those days as a lecturer. Of Kant in his young prime we have a portrait, showing him at the age of forty-four. More common is the portrait taken much later in life. Both show us the spare, small, insignificant-appearing man. He was of frail health, but
