XIV KANT S UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY 



of his renewed criticism of Pure Reason, whereby 

 he rationally escaped from the Agnosticism of 

 Kant, and opened the inner life of his pure 

 receptive soul for the whole play of the divine idea 

 of the world. But his comprehensive ideal realism 

 was also a child of the time, and shrank with ideal 

 sensitiveness from the firm grasp of the primitive 

 movement" of matter as we find it in the strong 

 Hercules grip displayed at the outset by Kant. 1 

 Along with many translations, we have very able 

 philosophical interpretations of Kant ; but most of 

 these deal with the Critical Philosophy from the 

 Hegelian standpoint, and can hardly be said to 

 reproduce the purely scientific spirit of Kant's own 

 thought, or to render it in its' completeness. They 

 shed much valuable reflected light upon Hegel as 

 regards the origin and meaning of his Dialectic ; 

 but they have little or nothing to say of Kant's 

 incomparably greater merit as a scientific discoverer 

 and a true scientist. 



Kant himself had no unscientific limitations. His 

 thought, while ever striving to be universal, was 

 scientific, or at least aimed to be scientific, all 

 through. Even in the vortex of his later philo- 

 sophical speculation, he did not forget his scientific 

 vocation, nor did he cease to prosecute it. The 



1 1 have lately published The Ideal of Humanity and Universal 

 Federation, by K. C. F. Krause (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh), which 

 may be regarded as a popular introduction to Krause's system of 

 thought. 



