Xll KANT S UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY 



onesidedness in the prevailing philosophical inter- 

 pretations of Kant. Kant did indeed put forth the 

 Critique of Pure Reason as the exposition of a 

 revolution in thought. He was roused from his 

 ' dogmatic slumber/ as he tells us, by the scepticism 

 of David Hume; and with intense consciousness 

 of the issue at stake he proceeds, somewhat labori- 

 ously and ostentatiously, to discuss the problems 

 of philosophy from a new point of view. This 

 came as a surprise to his age ; and the persistency, 

 elevation, and earnestness with which he carried 

 out his discussion, gradually won for him the 

 supreme position in the European philosophy of 

 the eighteenth century. It has been generally at 

 this point that philosophical students have begun 

 and carried on their study of his system, without 

 reference to what preceded and underlay it. His 

 earlier scientific work, like an inner planet merged in 

 light, was thus almost entirely lost sight of in the 

 blaze of his later philosophical splendour. And even 

 the greatest of his followers, originators of new specu- 

 lative schools as they were, never got truly behind 

 his distinctively philosophical period ; and none of 

 them rivalled or even approached him in genuine 

 scientific capacity and achievement. Fichte was 

 too deeply absorbed in subjective thought and its 

 independent creativeness, to care for Kant's careful 

 physical investigations. Schelling, with all his 

 poetic sympathy with Nature and his vital touch, 

 had neither the scientific method nor the exact 



