Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/193

 felt, the greatest reverence. But it must be confessed that the sketch of the Kantian philosophy, attempted in the second of his Essays, is little better than a travesty of the original. And this, unfortunately, is the only passage in which he speaks any length of the man who stands at the fountain-head of modern philosophy. It is possible that he had learned far more from Kant than would be gathered from his exposition. It is certain that he apologizes for 'the loose and popular manner in which he must here speak of these things'; and he was plainly in mortal terror of casting his pearls before swine. Yet, when every allowance has been made, his account of Kant's doctrine remains extremely superficial and inaccurate. The one definite conception he seems to have carried away from it is the famous distinction between the 'understanding' and the 'reason'; and his version of that, it is certain, would have been vehemently repudiated by Kant. It is, in fact, little better than the 'Coleridgian moonshine' of which he was to make immortal scorn in the Life of Sterling.

Nevertheless, it is hardly to be believed that he was not deeply influenced by Kant; and that, both on metaphysical and on moral grounds. Of all speculative doctrines, there is none which appealed so strongly to the imagination of Carlyle as that of the ideality of Space and Time. And this, though common to all the great thinkers of Germany, was, in a special sense, the property—as it was the discovery—of Kant. In default of clear evidence to the contrary, it is therefore natural to suppose that it came to Carlyle not through any intermediate channel, but direct from the source. And never did imaginative writer make more magnificent use of a metaphysical idea. The same probability meets us when we ask for the origin of Carlyle's theory of duty. It would be strange indeed if this owed nothing to the moral theory of Kant. The noble sternness of the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,