Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/126

102 was that unless there is more in experience than Locke’s view permitted it to contain, the hope of any transcendent knowledge or faith for humanity is indeed gone. That Hume showed this is his great merit, for hereby he led the way to Kant.

When I mention the name of Kant, who forms our special topic to-day, I introduce to you one whose thought arouses more suggestions in the mind of a philosophical student than cluster about any other modern thinker. One despairs of telling you all or any great part of what Kant has meant to one in the course of a number of years of metaphysical study; but let me still try to suggest a little of Kant's place in such a line of work. One hears of Kant early in one's life as a student of philosophy. He is said to be hard, perhaps a little dangerous (a thing which of course attracts one hugely!). He is said to be also certainly typical of German speculation, and always worthy of one's efforts if one means to philosophize at all. Perhaps one, therefore, first tries him in translation, with a sense that, even if one's German is not yet free, something must already be done to win him. The “Critique of Pure Reason,” how attractive the name! How wise one will be after criticising the pure reason through the reading of five or six hundred pages of close print! There is an old translation of Kant, in Bohn’s Library, by a certain Meiklejohn. One begins with that. The English is heavy, not to say shocking; but the first effect of the reading is soon a splendid sense of power, a feeling of the exhaustiveness of the treatment, of the skill and subtlety and fearlessness of this Kant. What seems to be a good deal of the book — not the chief part, indeed — one can even fairly grasp at the first reading. In fact, so persuasive, to certain minds, is the general external appearance of Kant's method of work, that there are students who, on their first superficial acquaintance with