Kant and his philosophical revolution Author:Robert Mark Wenley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE NEARER ENVIRONMENT Parentage—Home And School—Pietism We often contrive to isolate persons of distinction, by emphasising their exceptional... more » qualities, forgetful that they are men of like passions with ourselves. Thanks to scanty records for the years ere he became a personage, Kant has suffered not a little in this way. It were well to insist, therefore, that, despite petty tales to the contrary,1 he was a human being, not a soulless thinking machine — a human being whose origins, education, social relations, civil circumstances, and personal predilections cast some light upon the devious ways taken by his thought. No doubt, it is true, as the conventional record runs, that he was born in the remote city of Konigsberg, the son of a poor artisan; that he received his education and absorbed his culture in his native city, beyond whose limits he never travelled farther than sixty miles; that he earned his daily bread, first, as a resident tutor, then as an academic teacher, on miserable pay till he reached middle age; that he attained universal fame amonghis countrymen; that he died in his birthplace, full of years and crowned with honour, but broken by physical and mental infirmity, a wreck of his once self. But all this 1 Cf. e.g., Theodore F. Wright, in The New Church Review (Boston, U.S.A.), Jan. 1901 : A Swedenborgian 'estimate.' . " is as common As any the most vulgar thing to sense." Mere living implies little about a life; knowledge of the processes alone satisfies, especially in the case of one who served himself a mighty transitive force. These subtle ways may be few or many, they may be inaccessible or plain, their factors may be simple or elusive. In any event, they clamour insistently for attention, and it were foolish to ignore them, ev...« less