the scene of his whole life and labour. He was never outside of
Prussia except for a brief interval when Koenigsberg belonged to Russia.
He was a German professor of the old style. Studying, teaching, writing
books, these were his whole existence. He was the fourth of nine
children of a devoted pietist household. Two of his sisters served in
the houses of friends. The consistorial-rath opened the way to the
university. An uncle aided him to publish his first books. His earlier
interest was in the natural sciences. He was slow in coming to
promotion. Only after 1770 was he full professor of logic and
metaphysics. In 1781 he published the first of the books upon which
rests his world-wide fame. Nevertheless, he lived to see the triumph of
his philosophy in most of the German universities. His subjects are
abstruse, his style involved. It never occurred to him to make the
treatment of his themes easier by use of the imagination. He had but a
modicum of that quality. He was hostile to the pride of intellect often
manifested by petty rationalists. He was almost equally hostile to
excessive enthusiasm in religion. The note of his life, apart from his
intellectual power, was his ethical seriousness. He was in conflict with
ecclesiastical personages and out of sympathy with much of institutional
religion. None the less, he was in his own way one of the most religious
of men. His brief conflict with Woellner's government was the only
instance in which his peace and public honour were disturbed. He never
married. He died in Koenigsberg in 1804. He had been for ten years so
much enfeebled that his death was a merciful release.

Kant used the word 'critique' so often that his philosophy has been
called the 'critical philosophy.' The word therefore needs an
explanation. Kant himself distinguished two types of philosophy, which
he called the dogmatic and critical types. The essence of a dogmatic
philosophy is that it makes belief to rest upon knowledge. Its endeavour
is to demonstrate that which is believed. It brings out as its foil the
characteristically sceptical philosophy. This esteems that the proofs
advanced in the interest of belief are inadequate. The belief itself is
therefore an illusion. The essence of a critical philosophy, on the
other hand, consists in this, that it makes a distinction between the
functions of knowing and believing. It distinguishes between the
perception of that which is in accordance with natural law