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 758 KANT that time until 1755 to become a tutor in private families. In the last of these, that of Herr von Kaiserling of Konigsberg, his great talents and acquisitions were recognized, espe- cially by the lady of the house ; and here he was introduced into cultivated society, wearing off the bashf ulness and reserve of a poor stu- dent. At length, in 1755, he was able to enter upon the career of academic instructor, for which he had been preparing himself by assid- uous study and multifarious reading. His in- augural dissertations, as magister leyens, were De Igne and on the " First Principles of Meta- physical Science." In the same year ho pub- lished anonymously a treatise on the theory of the heavens, dedicated to Frederick the Great, and written in a clear and animated style. Here he prophesied the discovery of new plan- ets, and that the nebulae would be resolved into stars, besides advocating the position that a mechanical construction of nature was not adverse to the belief in a God. Lambert in 1761 advanced similar views, which led (1765- '70) to a correspondence between them. From the first Kant was a popular lecturer ; several of his courses were always attended by many of the citizens of the active and thriving city of Konigsberg, which had a high commercial and political as well as literary rank. His course on physical geography was begun in 1757, and continued to the close of his academic career, receiving fresh additions at each repetition. Kant himself never went beyond his native province, and as seldom as possible away from the city ; but he was an eager student of voy- ages and travels, and extracted all possible in- formation from every traveller he could come across. He also lectured on practical anthro- pology, the theory of teaching, natural law, the philosophy of religion, ethics, logic, and mathematics. In 1762 he published a treatise on the " False Subtlety of the four Syllogistic Figures," maintaining that only the first is "pure," the others being ratioeinia hybrids,. The next year he wrote an essay for a prize proposed by the Berlin academy on the " Prin- ciples of Natural Theology and Ethics ;" but Mendelssohn received the first and Kant the aecessit prize. He here says that a " real sys- tem of metaphysics " had never yet been writ- ten ; he was already busy with this task. In the same year appeared his work on the " Only Possible Ground of Demonstrating the Being of God," proposing a new form of the onto- logical proof, and rejecting the other three arguments. Existence, he says, is not a pred- icate conception, and therefore cannot be proved ; but the non-existence of God contains a logical contradiction. The new mode of proof which he advocates, Says Erdmann (Ge- schichte der Philosophie, vol. iii., p. 31), reverses the positions of the schools of Descartes and Leibnitz ; instead of inferring the existence of God as a consequence from the possibility, he takes the possibility as a consequence, and rea- sons back to the existence as the ground ; if anything is possible, there is some real being, the seat and source of all that is conceivable. The year 1770 is made by Rosenkranz (Ge- schichte der Kantischen Philosophic, 1840, vol. xii. of Kant's works) the dividing line between the earlier or tentative period of his specula- tions and the speculative and systematic period. In this year he became a professor in full in the university. For 15 years the subtlest and boldest thinker of Germany had been strug- gling along in obscurity, filling subordinate posts ; for example, that of a subaltern in the royal library for $50 a year, conferred on him in 1756, as an "accomplished" and "learned" person. lie was indeed offered the professor- ship of poetry in 1764; but this does not seem to have suited him. The professorship of logic and metaphysics was given him after he had de- clined invitations to Jena and Erlangen ; and his salary was to be $300 per annum. He was content with his native city and university; he wanted to labor in quiet, and work out the great problems which were stirring his mind. His inaugural dissertation, De Mundi Semibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Prineipiis, con- tains germs of his metaphysical system. He protests against the position that the knowl- edge of sense and that gained by the under- standing are to be distinguished as respectively obscure and clear. There is, he says, a knowl- edge of sensible phenomena which is distinct, as there may be conceptions of the understand- ing which are confused. We must distinguish between the matter and the form of our knowl- edge of sensible objects ; the form is given by the ideas of space and time, which are not ob- jectively real, but pure intuitions; and these give us the basis of the sciences of mathemat- ics and geometry. Intellectual knowledge is made up of pure or universal conceptions; not such as are abstracted from the phenomena of sense, but principles by which the understand- ing is guided, as those of necessity, possibility, causality, &c. Such are some of the positions in which he already arrays himself against ma- terialism on the one hand and dogmatism on the other. In 1772 (Erdmann, loc. cit. 37) he wrote about his scheme of a transcendental philosophy, which he hoped to finish in three months; in 1776 it was to be completed the next summer ; but not till 1781 did the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (" Criticism of the Pure Reason") make its appearance. For 11 years he had been writing and rewriting ; the final draft was composed in a few months. He was already 67 years old. His system had been very slow in its growth ; for a long time he was hardly conscious of what he was aim- ing at. He was pressed on the one hand by the abstract metaphysics of the idealism of Leibnitz as developed by Wolf ; on the other hand, Hume's skepticism, as he says, "awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers." His own work was intended to give their respective rights to both idealism and realism, to meta- physics and materialism ; yet, at the same time,