37/2 
NATORE 
[FEBRUARY 18, 1904 
shading of the drops forming the fog throughout a con- 
siderable distance. Each person looking at his own shadow 
sees this shading end on, but he can get only a side view 
of his neighbour’s shadow when the fog is near. When 
the fog-bank is far away compared with the distance 
between two spectators, each is looking at both shadows 
practically end on, and both are easily seen. 
Edinburgh, February 6. Reel 
Omonb. 
Corrections in Nomenclature: 
Ca’. 
call, 
Ca’—And the young lads hae na wit to ca’ 
the cream=drive (v. ‘‘ Encyclop. Dictionary ”’). 
J. A. Harvie Brown. 
Ca’ing Whale. 
It’s unco silly—the neighbours ca’ me a Jacobite= 
the cat frae 
THE CENTENARY OF) KANT. 
HUNDRED years have now passed since the 
death of Kant. On February 12 the great philo- 
sopher died at Konigsberg, in East Prussias where he 
spent practically his whole life, a long, laborious and 
ascetic one, 
science. That his teaching created a soma rive 
epoch in the history of thought, an epoch, indeed, 
which we refer and by w hich we estimate, of aoe 
all subsequent developments, will not be disputed, and 
so important a centenary has naturally claimed the 
attention of the whole cultivated world. Immanuel 
Kant is so much akin to some of our English writers, 
notably Locke and Hume—was it not Hume who, in 
his own words, ‘‘aroused him from his dogmatic 
slumbers ’’ and, moreover, does he not himself tell us | 
of his Scottish ancestry ?—and in some respects was so 
much influenced by them, that England may well join 
with Germany in paying a tribute “of reverence to his 
memory. Kant literature is so voluminous already, 
and the story of his life, so far as he had a life apart 
from his work, has been so well told, that little remains 
to be said beyond a brief reference to his intellectual 
affinities and to the relationship of his critical philo- 
sophy to the existing world of physical science, to com- 
pare, in other words, the a priori and ideal with the 
naturalist and a _ posteriori results. An antithesis 
between these two halves of thought has ever been a 
prominent feature in our efforts after knowledge, 
though of late it has grown to be regarded as a con- 
venience in classification rather than an absolute dis- 
tinction. For many of us the policeman still acts as 
the representative of ethics, and we are seldom trans- 
cendental except in personal instincts. It is also 
incontestable that 
** Until this paragon of spheres 
By philosophic thought coheres, 
The vast machine will be controlled 
By love and hunger as of old.” 
But in rational development nothing pleads more 
urgently for reconciliation in the future than these two 
great currents of human activity, one of which owes 
much to the genius of Kant and the other 
defatigable energy of recent research. 
So many and so varied workers have been animated 
by the spirit of Kant, conscious or unconscious of their 
debt, that there is a danger of overlooking the strength 
of his influence. Most can raise the flower now, all 
have got the seed, and even such dissimilar minds as 
Hegel, Schopenhauer and von Hartmann are truly 
consequent on Kant. A whole army is the better 
equipped for the ‘‘ celestial panoply ’’ of that solitary 
epoch-maker, lifted above the merely objective events 
of his age to his bestirnte Himmel by a torrent of 
thought setting inwards, centripetal rather than centri- 
fugal. So fine a mind, frailly supported by a delicate 
physique yet disciplined to a rigorous austerity in 
NO. 1790, VOL. 69] 
so 
to the in- 
| philosophic habit cannot be put on like a garment. 
matter and spirit, was surely destined to fame. The 
It 
is all or nothing. To be influenced at all is to be re- 
sponsive in every fibre; and with Kant the relation of 
the mind to its world was the San Graal of his quest— 
his religion. It was for him, too, its own reward, and 
almost the sole one, though in time he gained more 
of contemporary fame than comes to some of the great 
ones of the earth. For, as Spinosa says so deeply, 
‘* He who loves God truly must not look to be loved by 
Him in return.” 
it is interesting to note that the manner of Kant’s 
intellectual development, as instanced in the chrono- 
logical record of his works, is from the simpler to 
the more complex, from the physical to the psychical. 
It may be pointed out in this connection how solid 
/was the foundation of empirical knowledge upon 
_which he based his epistemology, 
and this is surely 
the sichere Gang der Wissenschaft. In this long 
period of apprenticeship we may trace the workings 
of that marvellous intuitive faculty which he em- 
ployed in the more abstract realms. His treatises on 
physical subjects traverse a wide range. In 
in the single-minded and ardent service of | 
tium.”’ 
and Theory of the Heavens ”’ 
““Thoughts on the True Estimate of Vis Viva” he 
shows the Cartesians and Leibnitzians to be fighting 
about different things. The dispute was due to in- 
correctness of definition as to the meaning of force, 
but it is only fair to say that Kant’s views, unknown 
to him, had been anticipated. In another essay he 
affirms that the earth’s rotation is slowly retarded by 
the action of the tides. But the ‘‘ General History 
of 1755 was a more 
ambitious work. He was then aged thirty-one, and 
at the height of his speculative power; extending the 
cosmographical conceptions of Newton to the whole 
phenomenal cosmos, he introduces for the first time 
the conceptions of the nebular theory. Though 
worked out more fully in its details by Laplace at 
a later date, this soul-stirring thought owes its 
essential origin to Kant, and may well be associated 
with his name rather than with that of the great 
Frenchman. This efflorescence of Kant’s comprehen- 
sive outlook has been the greatest triumph of cosmo- 
graphy since the publication, some two hundred years 
earlier, of the ‘‘De Revolutionibus Orbium Celes- 
And in his later work Kant was another and 
no less influential Copernicus) who showed how the 
planet feelings circle round the constructive and 
illuminating mind, where erstwhile that sun of reason 
had been held the satellite. He too divined that 
Nature, in its silent unplumbed depths of space and 
mind, holds more than earth and man. 
The growth of the body of knowledge since the death 
of that old man in Kénigsberg may be held to show 
more of bulk than of differentiation. Yet when we 
look to the fact that he forged a weapon of research, 
ready to the hand of all, rather than spend his labour 
within the meshes of a system such as those woven 
| by Comte and Spencer, we find cause for saying that 
Chronos does not always devour his own children. 
We are all thinkers, on our several planes, and the 
struggle for existence forces us to acute thinking at 
times, but we commonly fail to shut out the seeming 
discord between speculative ideals. and experience. 
The pressure of that ‘‘ unconscious ’’ which according 
to von Hartmann moulds our lives may seem the 
agent in advance of materialism, though the moral 
sphere is not yet wholly at its mercy. The universal 
practical acquiescence in the dogmas of conduct still 
silences theoretical doubt. In spite of the gigantic 
accumulation of scientific facts, no C&dipus has yet 
returned an answer more permanently satisfying than 
that which was given by Kant to the central question 
of the sphinx of life, as to the conditions of all and any 
