The canons of scientific evidence justify us neither in accepting
nor rejecting the ideas upon which morality and religion repose.
Both parties to the dispute beat the air; they worry their own
shadow; for they pass from Nature into the domain of speculation,
where their dogmatic grips find nothing to lay hold upon. The
shadows which they hew to pieces grow together in a moment like the
heroes in Valhalla, to rejoice again in bloodless battles.
Metaphysics can no longer claim to be the cornerstone of religion
and morality. But if she can not be the Atlas that bears the moral
world she can furnish a magic defense. Around the ideas of religion
she throws her bulwark of invisibility; and the sword of the
skeptic and the battering-ram of the materialist fall harmless on
vacuity.
--_Immanuel Kant_
[Illustration: IMMANUEL KANT]
We find that most men fit easily into types. You describe to me one
Durham cow and you picture all Durham cows. So it is with men: they
belong to breeds, which we politely call denominations, sects or
parties. Tell me the man's sect, and I know his dress, his habit of
life, his thought. His dress is the uniform of his party, and his
thought is that which is ordered and prescribed. Dull indeed is the
intellect which can not correctly prophesy the opinions to which this
man will arrive on any subject.
Durham cows are not exactly alike, I well know, but a trifle more length
of leg, a variation in color, or an off-angle of the horn, and that cow
is forever barred from exhibition as a Durham. She is fit only for beef,
and the first butcher that makes a bid takes her, hide and horns.
Members of sects do not think exactly alike, but there are well-defined
limits of thought and action, beyond which they dare not stray lest the
butcher bag them. In joining a sect they have given bonds to uniformity,
and have signed their willingness to think and act like all other
members of the sect.
Herbert Spencer deals with this "jiner" propensity in man, and describes
it as a manifestation of the herding instinct in animals. It is a
combination for mutual protection--a social contract, each one waiving a
part of his personality in order to secure a supposed benefit. A herd of
cattle can stand against a pack of wolves, but a cow alone is doomed.
Few men indeed can stand against the pack. Wise are the many who seek
safety in numbers! Think of those who have stood out alone and expressed
their individuality, and you count on your fingers God's patriots dead
and turned to dust.
The paradox of things is shown in that the entrenched many, having found
safety in aggregation, pay their debt of homage to the bold few who
lived their lives and paid the penalty by death.
Across the disk of existence, each decade, there glide five hundred
million souls, and disappear forever in the dim and dusk of the eternity
that lies behind. Out of the bare handful that are remembered, we
cherish only the memories of those who stood alone and expressed their
honest, inmost thought. And this thought is, always and forever, the
thought of liberty. Exile, ostracism, death, have been their fate, and
on the smoke of martyr-fires their souls mounted to immortality.
Future generations often confuse these men with Deity, the Maker of the
Worlds. And thus do we arrive at truth by indirection, for in very fact
these were the Sons of God, vitalized by Divinity, part and parcel of
the Power that guides the planets on their way and holds the worlds in
space. Upon their tombs we carve a single word: _Savior_.
* * * * *
Kant was sixty years old before he was known to any extent beyond his
native town; but so fast then did his fame travel that at his death it
was recognized that the greatest thinker of the world had passed away.
Kant founded no school; but Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herde and
Schopenhauer were all his children--and all but Schopenhauer showed
their humanity by denouncing him, for men are prone to revile that which
has benefited them most. Kant marks an epoch and all thinkers who came
after him are his debtors. His philosophy has passed into the current
coin of knowledge.
Kant's lifelong researches revolve around four propositions:
1. Who am I?
2. What am I?
3. What can I do?
4. What can I know?
The answer to Number Four is that I can not know anything. That is to
say, the wise man is the man who knows that he does not know. And this
disposes of Number One and Number Two, leaving only Number Three for our
consideration. It took, however, a good many years and a vast amount of
study and writing for Kant to thus simplify. For years he toiled with
algebraic formulas and syllogistic theorems before he concluded that the
best wisdom of life lies in simplification, not complexity.
"What can I do?" resolves itself into, "What must I do?" And the answer
is: You must do four things in order to retain your place as a normal
being upon this earth: eat, work, associate with your kind, rest. Just
four things we must do, and outside of this everything is incidental,
accidental, irrelevant and inconsequential. Then how to eat, work,
associate and rest wisely and best constitutes life. Every man should be
free to work out these four equations for himself, his freedom ending
where another man's rights begin. To these four questions we should
bring our highest reason, our ripest experience and our best endeavor.
As for himself we know that Kant made a schedule of life which evolved a
sickly boy into a reasonably strong man who banished pain, sorrow and
regret from his existence and lived a long life of deep, quiet
satisfaction, sane to the end, watching every symptom of approaching
dissolution with keen interest, and at the last passing into quiet
sleep, his spirit gliding peacefully away, perhaps to answer those two
great questions which he said were unanswerable here: "Who am I?" "What
am I?"
* * * * *
Immanuel Kant was born in Seventeen Hundred Twenty-four at the City of
Konigsberg, in the northeastern corner of Prussia. There he received his
education; there he was a teacher for nearly half a century; and there,
in his eightieth year, he died. He was never out of East Prussia and
never journeyed sixty miles from his birthplace during his whole life.
Professor Josiah Royce of Harvard, himself in the sage business, and
perhaps the best example that America has produced of the pure type of
philosopher, says, "Kant is the only modern thinker who in point of
originality is worthy to be ranked with Plato and Aristotle." Like
Emerson, Kant regarded traveling as a fool's paradise; only Emerson had
to travel much before he found it out, while Kant gained the truth by
staying at home. Once a lady took him for a carriage ride, and on
learning from the footman that they were seven miles from home he was so
displeased that he refused to utter a single orphic on the way back; and
further, the story is that he never after entered a vehicle, and living
for thirty years was never again so far from the lodging he called home.
In his lectures on physical geography Kant would often describe
mountains, rivers, waterfalls, volcanoes, with great animation and
accuracy, yet he had never seen any of these. Once a friend offered to
take him to Switzerland, so he could actually see the mountains; but he
warmly declined, declaring that the man who was not satisfied until he
could touch, taste and see was small, mean and quibbling as was Thomas,
the doubting disciple. Moreover, he had samples of the strata of the
Alps, and this was enough, which reminds us of the man who had a house
for sale and offered to send a prospective purchaser a sample brick.
Mind was the great miracle to Kant--the ability to know all about a
thing by seeing it with your inward eye. "The Imagination hath a stage
within the brain upon which all scenes are played," and the play to Kant
was greater than the reality. Or, to use his own words: "Time and Space
have no existence apart from Mind. There is no such thing as Sound
unless there be an ear to receive the vibrations. Things and places,
matter and substance come under the same law, and exist only as mind
creates them."
* * * * *
The parents of Kant were very lowly people. His father was a day
laborer--a leather-cutter who never achieved even to the honors and
emoluments of a saddler. There were seven children in the family, and
never a servant crossed the threshold. One daughter survived Immanuel,
and in her eighty-fourth year she expressed regrets that her brother had
proved so recreant to the teachings of his parents as practically to
alienate him from all his relatives. One brother became a Lutheran
minister and lived out an honored career; the others vanish and fade
away into the mist of forgetfulness.
So far as we know, all the children were strong and well except this
one. At birth he weighed but five pounds, and his weakness was pitiable.
He was the kind of child the Spartans used to make way with quickly, for
the good of the State. He had a big, bulging head, thin legs, a weak
chest, and one shoulder was so much higher than the other that it
amounted almost to a deformity.
As the years went by, the parents saw he was not big enough to work, but
hope was not dead--they would make a preacher of him! To this end he was
sent to the "Fredericianium," a graded school of no mean quality. The
master of this school was a worthy clergyman by the name of Schultz, who
was attracted to the Kant boy, it seems, on account of his insignificant
size. It was the affection of the shepherd for the friendless ewe lamb.
A little later the teacher began to love the boy for his big head and
the thoughts he worked out of it. Brawn is bought with a price--young
men who bank on it get it as legal tender. Those who have no brawn have
to rely on brain or go without honors. Immanuel Kant began to ask his
school-teacher questions that made the good man laugh.
At sixteen Kant entered Albertina University. And there he was to remain
his entire life--student, tutor, teacher, professor.
He must have been an efficient youth, for before he was eighteen he
realized that the best way to learn is to teach. The idea of becoming a
clergyman was at first strong upon him; and Pastor Schultz occasionally
sent the youth out to preach, or lead religious services in rural
districts. This embryo preacher had a habit of placing a box behind the
pulpit and standing on it while preaching. Then we find him reasoning
the matter out in this way: "I stand on a box to preach so as to impress
the people by my height or to conceal my insignificant size. This is
pretense and a desire to carry out the idea that the preacher is bigger
every way than common people. I talk with God in pretended prayer, and
this looks as if I were on easy and familiar terms with Deity. Is it
like those folks who claim to be on friendly terms with princes: If I do
not know anything about God, why should I pretend I do?"
This desire to be absolutely honest with himself gradually grew until
he informed the Pastor that he had better secure young men for preachers
who could impress people without standing on a box. As for himself, he
would impress people by the size of his head, if he impressed them at
all. Let it here be noted that Kant then weighed exactly one hundred
pounds, and was less than five feet high. His head measured twenty-four
inches around, and fifteen and one-half inches over "firmness" from the
opening of the ears. To put it another way, he wore a seven-and-a-half
hat.
It is a great thing for a man to pride himself on what he is and make
the best of it. The pride of craftsman betokens a valuable man. We
exaggerate our worth, and this is Nature's plan to get the thing done.
Kant's pride of intellect, in degree, came from his insignificant form,
and thus do all things work together for good. But this bony little form
was often full of pain, and he had headaches, which led a wit to say,
"If a head like yours aches, it must be worse than to be a giraffe and
have a sore throat."
Young Kant began to realize that to have a big head, and get the right
use from it, one must have vital power enough to feed it.
The brain is the engine--the lungs and digestive apparatus the boiler.
Thought is combustion.
Young Kant, the uncouth, became possessed of an idea that made him the
butt of many gibes and jeers. He thought that if he could breathe
enough, he would be able to think clearly, and headaches would be gone.
Life, he said, was a matter of breathing, and all men died from one
cause--a shortness of breath. In order to think clearly, you must
breathe.
We believe things first and prove them later; our belief is usually
right, when derived from experience, but the reasons we give are often
wrong. For instance, Kant cured his physical ills by going out of doors,
and breathing deeply and slowly with closed mouth. Gradually his health
began to improve. But the young man, not knowing at that time much about
physiology, wrote a paper proving that the benefit came from the fresh
air that circulated through his brain. And of course in one sense he was
right. He related the incident of this thesis many years after in a
lecture, to show the result of right action and wrong reasoning.
The doctors had advised Kant he must quit study, but when he took up his
breathing fad, he renounced the doctors, and later denounced them. If he
were going to die, he would die without the benefit of either the clergy
or the physicians.
He denied that he was sick, and at night would roll himself in his
blankets and repeat half-aloud, "How comfortable I am, how comfortable I
am," until he fell asleep.
Near his house ran a narrow street, just a half-mile long. He walked
this street up and back, with closed mouth, breathing deeply, waving a
rattan cane to ward away talkative neighbors, and to keep up the
circulation in his arms. Once and back--in a month he had increased this
to twice and back. In a year he had come to the conclusion that to walk
the length of that street eight times was the right and proper
thing--that is to say, four miles in all. In other words, he had found
out how much exercise he required--not too much or too little. At
exactly half-past three he came out of his lodging, wearing his cocked
hat and long, snuff-colored coat, and walked. The neighbors used to set
their clocks by him. He walked and breathed with closed mouth, and no
one dare accost him or walk with him. The hour was sacred and must not
be broken in upon: it was his holy time--his time of breathing.
The little street is there now--one of the sights of Konigsberg, and the
cab-drivers point it out as the Philosopher's Walk. And Kant walked that
little street eight times every afternoon from the day he was twenty to
within a year of his death, when eighty years old.
This walking and breathing habit physiologists now recognize as
eminently scientific, and there is no sensible physician but will
endorse Kant's wisdom in renouncing doctors and adopting a regimen of
his own. The thing you believe in will probably benefit you--faith is
hygienic.
The persistency of the little man's character is shown in the breathing
habit--he believed in himself, relied on himself, and that which
experience commended, he did.
This firmness in following his own ideas saved his life. When we think
of one born in obscurity, living in poverty, handicapped by pain,
weakness and deformity; never traveling; and then by sheer persistency
and force of will rising to the first place among thinking men of his
time, one is almost willing to accept Kant's dictum, "Mind is supreme,
and the Universe is but the reflected thought of God."
* * * * *
Kant was great enough to doubt appearances and distrust popular
conclusions. He knew that fallacies of reasoning follow fast upon
actions--reason follows by slow freight. It is quite necessary that we
should believe in a Supreme Power, but quite irrelevant that we should
prove it.
Truth for the most part is unpopular, and the proof of this statement
lies in the fact that it is so seldom told. Preachers tell people what
they wish to hear, and indeed this must be so as long as the
congregation that hears the preaching pays for it. People will not pay
for anything they do not like. Hence, preaching leads naturally to
sophistication and hypocrisy, and the promise of endless bliss for
ourselves and a hell for our enemies comes about as a matter of course.
What men will listen to and pay for is the real science of theology.
That is to say, the science of theology is the science of manipulating
men. Success in theology consists in finding a fallacy that is palatable
and then banking on it. Again and again Kant points out that a
clergyman's advice is usually worthless, because pure truth is out of
his province--unaccustomed, undesirable, inexpedient.
And Kant thought this was true also of doctors--doctors care more about
pleasing their patients than telling them truth. "In fact," he said, "no
doctor with a family to support can afford to tell his patients that his
symptoms are no token of a disease--rather uncomfortable feelings are
proof of health, for dead men don't have them." Most of the aches,
pains and so-called irregularities are remedial moves on the part of
Nature to keep the man well. Kant says that doctors treat symptoms, not
diseases, and often the treatment causes the disease; so no man can tell
what proportion of diseases is caused by medicine and what by other
forms of applied ignorance.
As for lawyers, our little philosopher considered them, for the most
part, sharks and wreckers. A lawyer looks over an estate, not with the
idea of keeping it intact, but of dissolving it, and getting a part of
it for himself. Not that men prefer to do what is wrong, but
self-interest can always produce sufficient reasons to satisfy the
conscience. Lawyers, being attaches of courts of justice, regard
themselves as protectors of the people, when really they are the
plunderers of the people, and their business is quite as much to defeat
justice as to administer it. The evasion of law is as truly a lawyer's
work as compliance with law. Then our philosopher explains that if law
and justice were synonymous, this state of affairs would be most
deplorable; but as it is, no particular harm is worked, save in the
moral degradation of the lawyers. The connivance of lawyers tames the
rank injustices of law; hence, to a degree, we live in a land where
there is neither law nor justice--save such justice as can be
appropriated by the man who is diplomat enough to do without lawyers and
wise enough to have no property. Justice, however, to Kant is a very
uncertain quantity, and he is rather inclined to regard the idea that
men are able to administer justice as on a par with the assumption of
the priest that he is dealing with God.