rPHERE has been something curious in the reception 

 - which the philosophy of the German metaphysician Kant 

 has met with in England. One class of persons have their 

 minds fully made up that all " German metaphysics " is mys- 

 tical and unintelligible, extravagant and absurd; and that 

 Kant is eminently marked with those characteristics. As 

 a representative of this opinion we may take a gentleman 

 who has published " A History of Moral Science " in two 

 volumes, and who writes thus : 



" I must confess myself completely ignorant of the Criti- 

 cal or Transcendental Philosophy of Emanuel Kant. I have 

 made several attempts to get a glimpse of his system, but 

 have been obliged to give up the undertaking in despair. 

 Talk of scholastic jargon and barbarism ! Why, if it were 

 possible to extract all the verbal jargon of the schools, 

 from the Christian era down to the fifteenth century, into 

 one book, it would come far short of the obscurity of the 

 Critical Philosophy. No English reader can form the most 

 distant conception of Kant's writings without he saw them. 

 [sic]. But let the reader suppose that every sentence of this 

 book were cut separately out of it, all put into a bag, and 

 well shaken, and then promiscuously taken out one by one, and 

 placed in the form of a book again ; he might then have 

 some faint idea of the transcendental opinions of this German 

 writer." 



Another author who must be considered as representing 

 a very different degree of culture and thoughtfulness from 

 the one just quoted, still speaks in a manner hardly less dis- 

 paraging. The temperate and critical Dugald Stewart, in his 



