Prussia as private tutor, he habilitated as Privatdozent at the University, in which capacity he labored for a long period with pronounced success. Not until 1770 did he receive an ordinary professorship. He never left his native province of East Prussia. He devoted his whole life to the elaboration of his works and to his academic instruction. Notwithstanding this however he participated actively in the social life of Königsberg and had the reputation of being a most agreeable companion. He belongs to the period of the enlightenment, but he regarded "enlightenment" as a process, a problem, rather than as a finished product. And finally, when his critical principle led him into profound depths, unknown to the ordinary enlightenment, he possessed a sense for the sublime in harmony with the conception of the aesthetic, ethical and religious which furnished the guiding principle of his mental life. In his old age, under the clerical reaction which followed the death of Frederick the Great, he suffered persecution. The publication of an essay on religious philosophy in 1793 brought forth a royal rescript against him with a threat of severer measures in case he persisted in the same tendency. Kant replied with the declaration that he would thenceforth neither speak nor write anything whatsoever on religious matters. He did not renew his activities in the philosophy of religion until the beginning of a new administration when he published the whole of the controversial proceeding (in the preface to the Streit der Facultäten, 1798). His last years present a case of the gradual disintegration of a mighty spirit. He apparently became a victim of dementia senilis. Isolated moments of mental brilliance are the only reminders of his former greatness. He died on the 12th of February, 1804.
