Page:Kant's Prolegomena etc (1883).djvu/27

 noticeable than in the author of the Dictionnaire Philosophique. In Kant, on the contrary, may be discerned the germs of the historical method which explains rather than attacks dogmas, and of the extra-theological (in contradistinction to anti-theological) attitude of modern science, which, wherever possible, ignores points of direct conflict by disregarding dogma as altogether outside its sphere. This later mode of thought, there can be no doubt, had its origin in Kant's distinction of the speculative and practical reason, although adopted by many who would repudiate this distinction. The world of philosophy and science has more and more tended in the 19th century to exclude all direct theological considerations, whether apologetic or polemical, from its pale. There can, we think, be little doubt that the habit of thought inaugurated by the Königsberg thinker, in spite of its reverent attitude towards, at least, the fundamental conceptions of theology, has been an incomparably more potent factor in current disintegration, at least outside the Latin countries, than the direct onslaughts of Voltaire and the French thinkers of the 18th century. The tendency at present is, indeed, to exaggerate the historical method, or at least to draw from it conclusions scarcely warranted. The sense of historic continuity, and of evolution, leads many thinkers to ignore the significance of epoch-making events and sudden changes, or of voluntarily-directed action in human affairs.

But to return to our young schoolboy, as yet in ignorance of the destiny the fates had in store for him, and anticipating, in all probability, as the farthest goal of his studies no more than the Pfarrerthum of some country town or village. Kant was never largely communicative on the subject of his boyhood, but the couple of stories preserved may as well be reproduced. On one occasion, when on his way to school, he was allured