Kant

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 34 CHAPTER IV. PROFESSOR KANT IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. In 1770, at the age of forty-six, Kant reached the office which was the summit of his ambition. Already in 1769 negotiations had been begun by the university of Erlangen, with the view of securing Kant for the professorship of logic and metaphysics; and a similar offer came about the same time from Jena. But as it happened, it was now possible to retain Kant at Kb'nigs- berg, ?a course which to his mind far surpassed possible advantages elsewhere. By the death of the professor of mathematics a vacancy arose; and an arrangement was effected by which Buck succeeded to the mathematical chair, and resigned to Kant the very professorship of logic and metaphysics for which he had been twelve years before an unsuccessful applicant. On the 20th August 1770, accordingly, Kant read himself into his chair by a Latin dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sense-World and the World Intellectual, ?an essay which, in a scholastic and unequal form, laid down, almost in its very title, the lines which, in the subsequent ' Criticism of the Eeason, ' determine how Professorial Stipend. 35 far knowledge by the mere intellect is a possibility. The post of respondent in the discussion was taken by his young Jewish friend, Dr Marcus Herz, subsequently a well-known physician of Berlin. From 1770 to 1804 Kant continued to be professor at Kb'nigsberg. He was not, indeed, without temptations or inducements from other quarters. A more lucrative post at Mitau, in Courland, was declined by him. Zed- litz, the minister for schools and churches under Frederick, had been a great admirer of Kant's, whose lectures on physical geography he studied in manuscript notes, carried to Berlin by Kraus, one of Kant's younger friends. Zedlitz was..