SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



because they find favor in the eyes of god and 

 men, particularly of men clothed with authority." 



The followers of Kant claim that he has de- 

 fined the powers and limits of human perception 

 for all time to come. But the " Critique of Pure 

 Reason " demonstrates precisely the impossibility 

 of such absolute perception on the part of 

 Kant or of any other man. His own 

 powers of perception, especially in sociology, 

 certainly never penetrated beyond the bour- 

 geois horizon, and in other respects even 

 some of his immediate followers surpassed him, 

 for instance Laplace in his elaboration of the 

 nebular theory, and Schopenhauer, the legitimate 

 heir of his philosophy, in ethics. As for the germ 

 of truth contained in Kant's "categorical im- 

 perative " and in his " thing in itself," we shall 

 see that proletarian philosophers gathered out of 

 it an advance in thought for the revolution of 

 the modern working class. 



In the same year, in which Kant's " Critique 

 of Pure Reason " appeared, Herschel discovered 

 the planet Uranus. And two years later, the 

 brothers Montgolfier made their first successful 

 balloon ascension, opening new fields of research 

 in the atmosphere and spurring the inventive 

 minds of humanity to greater technical exertions. 



