Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/162

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
138
THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY.

also these new adventures; but meanwhile I want to point out to you, ere we bid farewell to our greatest modern thinker, how there are more senses than one in which henceforth, wherever our feet carry us, his wisdom will go with us and direct us. After all, the spiritual world that Kant bade us build is the modern world; and Kant is the true hero of all modern thought. If in one sense it is only by transcending him and even by forgetting some of his limitations that we are to triumph, he is none the less forever our guide. Kant is, if you like, the homely and somewhat incongruous figure, a sort of John Brown of our century of speculative warfare. Derided as a rebel and an enemy of the faith by many of his own time, he dies before the modern conflict is fairly begun, but his soul goes marching on through the whole of it. Or to take another more suggestive, but similarly inadequate comparison, he resembles the hero of the Heroic Symphony, who is dead and buried in the second movement, but who is none the less spiritually and obviously present in the romantic and fairy-like outburst of new life in the scherzo, and the joyous apotheosis of the triumphant warriors that, in the fourth movement, crowns the symphony. Both these figures, I grant you, are somewhat imperfect; but still, I insist, in some such sense Kant will henceforth be our companion, — the leader who inspires us while we no longer see him at the head, the man whose precise system we no longer hold, but who still is the creator of our thought.

I must indeed have failed entirely in my summary of Kant’s own theoretical views, in the last lecture, if I did not suggest to you how full Kant’s cautious and skeptical doctrine is of motives that will lead us beyond him. Remember how, for the first, he declared the world of the things in themselves to be wholly inaccessible to our intellect, just because the world for our intellect is our own world. The search for accessible truth, thinks Kant, is then the search for one’s own personal larger self. Be-