TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION XC1X 



only the power of external circumstances, the want 

 of the means necessary for independent scientific 

 research, and the tone of thought prevalent at the 

 time, kept him to philosophy, in which it was only 

 much later that he produced anything original and 

 important. . . . He was restricted to the scanty 

 measure of knowledge and appliances of his time, 

 and of the out-of-the-way place where he lived; 

 but, with a large and intelligent mind, he strove 

 after such more general points of view as Alexander 

 von Humboldt afterwards worked out. It is exactly 

 an inversion of the historical connection when Kant's 

 name is occasionally misused, to recommend that 

 natural philosophy shall leave the inductive method 

 by which it has become great to revert to the windy 

 speculations of a so-called " deductive method." No 

 one would have attacked such a misuse more ener- 

 getically and more incisively than Kant himself, if 

 he were still among us.' Surely all this must come 

 straight home to the English student of science. 1 



Criticisms. Criticisms of Kant's positions have 

 gone hand in hand with the renewed interest of 



1 Helmholtz, Popular Lectures, Second Series, 1881, p. 141. Mr. 

 Becker, referring to another Lecture, ' On the Interaction of Natural 

 Forces,' delivered February 7, 1854, at Konigsberg (translated by 

 Professor Tyndall in the First Series), points out ' that it is certainly 

 most curious that at a Kant celebration Helmholtz should have 

 announced the rediscovery of four of Kant's theories.' (This lecture, 

 however, was not delivered at ' a Kant celebration,' but was addressed 

 to the Physico-economical Society of Konigsberg, in promotion of a 

 movement to erect a public monument to Kant. See Helmholtz's 

 Vortrcige u. Reden, 4 A. Bd. I. Vorr.) No doubt Helmholtz had read 



