remote abode on the Baltic coast, he had his eye upon everything going on in the distant world. In his prime, he rejoiced with the Americans when they won their independence, and in his old age he hoped and trembled by turns as the French Revolution unfolded itself.

Kant's disposition to trouble himself little about the speculations of his contemporaries became decided, as has been hinted above, only when his own system had acquired shape after long years of protracted meditation. During those years he had been sufficiently open to impressions from without, and he eagerly appropriated and weighed in the balance all philosophical novelties that had any bearing on the matter of his own thoughts. For instance, we see him in those early years much occupied with the pretensions of Swedenborg, the great Scandinavian mystic, and it must be interesting to note the most rigid thinker of the century face to face with the gigantic dreamer. Perhaps it may be even useful to learn what a singularly calm and clear intellect thought of the most daring of all spiritual enthusiasts, seeing how strong a front is still shown by those who make believe that they know all the depths of the arcana cœlestia.

Swedenborg is so familiar a name that a short description of him, given by Kant himself in one place, will suffice to introduce him. "There lives," we read, "in Stockholm a certain Herr "Swedenborg, in a private station and "in the enjoyment of a considerable "fortune. His whole occupation, by "his own account, consists in holding "converse with spirits and departed "souls. He gets from them the news "of the other world, giving them in "return the news of this; and, when "he has done composing big books "about his discoveries, he travels, from "time to time, to London to have them "published. He is not at all reticent "with his secrets, but speaks freely about "them to anybody, and he appears to "be perfectly convinced of the truth of

In 1758 Kant was a lecturer of three or four years' standing in the university, and had already begun to draw the attention of his colleagues and of the public without. His subject was ma

thematics and physical science, but he was known to have studied philosophy with great care. He had already thought much independently, but had hardly as yet struck into that line of speculation which led after a long period to the publication of the "Critique of Pure Reason." A young lady had written to him, asking information and an opinion concerning the strange stories afloat of Swedenborg's dealings with spirits, and Kant's reply has been preserved.

The letter begins in the style of laboured compliment fashionable at the time, which, along with the other accomplishments of a gentleman, Kant had learned to perfection when he mixed as a house-tutor in the best society of the province. He protests that he is little disposed by nature to be very credulous, but allows that his old indifference to all manner of idle ghost-stories has been much shaken, on finding that people like the Queen of Sweden and divers staid ambassadors have deposed to a real case of communion with spirits, which they assert that Swedenborg has given them proof of. He (Kant) wrote to the wondrous man himself, to make more searching inquiries, and, although he has received no answer, he has been assured by an English friend who visited Swedenborg at Stockholm, that the seer took his inquiries kindly, and means to answer them in the book he is about to publish in London. To gratify the laudable curiosity of his fair correspondent, he will add two new stories, which he has on good authority. The one concerns the discovery of a missing paper which

MANY centuries ago, Königsberg began to grow up around a fort, which was one of the outposts of Christianity against a form of Paganism that had long dragged on its existence amid the dense woods that line the south-eastern shore of the Baltic Sea. When the

struggle was ended, the town expanded into a trading-port, and in the sixteenth century a careful ruler placed in it a university for the civilizing of the rude population scattered over the surrounding country. The new university seems to have done its work soberly enough, but probably quite as well as could have been expected, time and place considered, and it served at least, by its very presence, to remind busy townsfolk of something higher than buying and selling. But in the eighteenth century, it left off witnessing mutely of better things, and suddenly became a real power in the town and district. Not that the trade had begun to fall off, for down at the river the bustle was greater than before, but it was noticed that the citizens spoke often now about the university and the professors. Besides, strangers (other than sea-captains) came in numbers every year from remote parts of Germany and from different countries, some bent on study, others curious to see on what an unlikely spot the muses were cultivated with such success and fame. Now, it so happened that among the professors, the townspeople had most to say of their own Kant, and it was the same Kant that strangers were most anxious to see.

Kant was a true son of Königsberg. He said often that his grandfather had come from Scotland, and for a long time wrote his name Cant in orthodox Scotch fashion, but he himself saw the light first in the capital of Ost-Preussen.

warehouses and beside the ships, and then was sent by his thrifty parents to the university. They wished that their son should enter the Church, and he did indeed apply himself to theology; but at last he yielded to his own very decided preference for science and philosophy. When the student-days were ended, he had to leave his loved Königsberg, to become a house-tutor in the country; but he never went beyond his native province, and often resided during the winter in the old familiar place, when the noble families of the province came up to town. This mode of life lasted a few years, he studying busily all the while; until, at the age of thirty, he came back finally to the old spot, and began his professorial career. During the remaining fifty years of his life, he may be said never to have lost sight of the church-steeples of Königsberg.

He devoted himself steadily to his academical duties, observed very narrowly everything that came within his horizon, thought harder than any man alive, and wrote, for the most part, dry books. That was his life—the life, one would suppose, of a man with narrow sympathies, and indifferent to anything but a distorted ideal world of his own. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Kant was too poor to travel, and knew other countries only from books, and newspapers, and hearsay; but he knew them very thoroughly. Philosopher as he was, he would converse more readily with an English skipper, who could tell him of distant lands, than with the heaviest of the heavy metaphysicians who sought his presence. Books of travels were always welcome to him, and much more welcome than other men's speculations when he had once become conscious of having outstripped

remote abode on the Baltic coast, he had his eye upon everything going on in the distant world. In his prime, he rejoiced with the Americans when they won their independence, and in his old age he hoped and trembled by turns as the French Revolution unfolded itself.

Kant's disposition to trouble himself little about the speculations of his contemporaries became decided, as has been hinted above, only when his own system had acquired shape after long years of protracted meditation. During those years he had been sufficiently open to impressions from without, and he eagerly appropriated and weighed in the balance all philosophical novelties that had any bearing on the matter of his own thoughts. For instance, we see him in those early years much occupied with the pretensions of Swedenborg, the great Scandinavian mystic, and it must be interesting to note the most rigid thinker of the century face to face with the gigantic dreamer. Perhaps it may be even useful to learn what a singularly calm and clear intellect thought of the most daring of all spiritual enthusiasts, seeing how strong a front is still shown by those who make believe that they know all the depths of the arcana cœlestia.

Swedenborg is so familiar a name that a short description of him, given by Kant himself in one place, will suffice to introduce him. "There lives," we read, "in Stockholm a certain Herr "Swedenborg, in a private station and "in the enjoyment of a considerable "fortune. His whole occupation, by "his own account, consists in holding

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converse with spirits and departed "souls. He gets from them the news "of the other world, giving them in "return the news of this; and, when "he has done composing big books "about his discoveries, he travels, from "time to time, to London to have them "published.

He is not at all reticent "with his secrets, but speaks freely about "them to anybody, and he appears to "be perfectly convinced of the truth of

knowing cheat or charlatan about "him."

This is Kant's account of Swedenborg in 1766, taken from a work to be alluded to farther on. But there is a still earlier notice, of which something must first be said.

In 1758 Kant was a lecturer of three or four years' standing in the university, and had already begun to draw the attention of his colleagues and of the public without. His subject was mathematics and physical science, but he was known to have studied philosophy with great care. He had already thought much independently, but had hardly as yet struck into that line of speculation which led after a long period to the publication of the "Critique of Pure Reason." A young lady had written to him, asking information and an opinion concerning the strange stories afloat of Swedenborg's dealings with spirits, and Kant's reply has been preserved.

The letter begins in the style of laboured compliment fashionable at the time, which, along with the other accomplishments of a gentleman, Kant had learned to perfection when he mixed as a house-tutor in the best society of the province. He protests that he is little disposed by nature to be very credulous, but allows that his old indifference to all manner of idle ghost-stories has been much shaken, on finding that people like the Queen of Sweden and divers staid ambassadors have deposed to a real case of communion with spirits, which they assert that Swedenborg has given them proof of. He (Kant) wrote to the wondrous man himself, to make more searching inquiries, and, although he has received no answer, he has been assured by an English friend who visited Swedenborg at Stockholm, that the seer took his inquiries kindly, and means to answer them in the book he is about to publish in London. To gratify the laudable curiosity of his fair correspondent, he will add two new stories, which he has on good authority. The one concerns the discovery of a missing paper which

lay hidden until Swedenborg, after consulting with the departed spirit who had in his lifetime concealed it, indicated a certain secret drawer unknown to all the world, as well as himself, previously. The other story relates how, one evening, immediately on his arrival in Gothenburg from England, Swedenborg announced to a large company that he saw a fearful conflagration raging at the moment in Stockholm (more than two hundred miles distant), and that his own house was in danger; how he continued in a very excited state for an hour or more, until, at last, he exclaimed joyfully, that, God be thanked, the fire had been extinguished just two doors from his; finally, how, a day or two later, the post came in, and verified his assertions to the minutest particular. Tales like these, thinks Kant, are not to be thrown aside with a mere smile, but, seeing they admit of proof or disproof, should be diligently searched into. For himself, he regrets not to be able to see Swedenborg in person, because he could cross-question him more minutely than any of his informants seem to have done, or been able to do. Yet it is a slippery business at best, and better men than he can hardly hope to make much of it. Meanwhile he waits with impatience till the promised book shall appear; but then he will be delighted to communicate to his young friend the best opinion he finds himself able to form.

The book did appear, and we may hope that Kant kept his promise to the curious young lady; but, if he wrote, his letter exists no longer. How far, too, he felt himself satisfied at the time, we do not know. The tone of his first letter is diffident enough, and is the tone of a man who is cautiously feeling his way. When he next alludes to Swedenborg, we note a very marked difference in his manner. In 1766 he published a small book, entitled, "Dreams of a Spirit-seer, interpreted by Dreams of Metaphysic." In the interval, Kant had become a notable man in the university, partly because

were, partly because it was seen that there was more behind. He gave less attention now to the physical sciences, and was plunged in the speculations, which, when published five years later, were to make an epoch in the history of philosophy. He had gone already far enough to have a touchstone of his own for the proving of other men's thoughts, and wrote like a man conscious of his power. The work, named above, not only gives us the best insight into Kant's thoughts at this interesting period, but it is important in another respect. It shows a side of Kant which is hardly known to exist. The few in this country who study, or need to study, the great thinker in his own pages, begin and generally end with the "Critique of Pure Reason." The book is confessedly dry and difficult (it was made intentionally so), and the author comes to be regarded as one who could express his thoughts only in the most beggarly fashion. De Quincey speaks of sentences in the book which "have been "measured by the carpenter; and some "of them run two feet eight by six "inches." Kant is looked upon, accordingly, as the type of all that is wearisome, formal, and severe. It is, then, a most agreeable surprise to learn (as many have learned from a pleasant essay by the critic just named) that the ponderous thinker, who might have been supposed to subsist entirely on unsatisfying metaphysical abstractions, became quite human after mid-day, and dined very heartily, and always in the company of one or two guests. The surprise will be as great, if it is next asserted that Kant could write not only well, but even in a very racy style, when he chose. So much is abundantly proved by "The Dreams of a Spiritseer," and it would not be easy to find pages which cover up more delicate irony, or are relieved by more genial humour.

Here is part of Kant's apology for the subject of his book :"Because it "is as absurd a prejudice to disbelieve. "without cause every story, how likely

"everything without examination, the "author of this work, to rid his mind of "the first prejudice, suffered himself to

be carried off some little way by the "second. He confesses, with a certain "self-abasement, that he was simple"hearted enough to search out the "truthfulness of some spirit-stories. "He found-as commonly happens "when there is nothing to seek-he "found nothing. Now, this of itself "might appear reason enough for writing a book; but there was added "something besides, which has often "extorted books from modest authors"to wit, the pressing entreaties of "friends, known and unknown. More

"

over, a ponderous book had been " purchased; and, still worse, had been "read, and all this trouble was surely "not to go for nothing. Hence arose "the present treatise, which, the "author flatters himself, will perfectly "satisfy the reader as to the nature "of the subject discussed therein; for a large part he will not comprehend, something of the rest he will not believe, and the remainder he will "laugh at."

In giving some account of this work of Kant's-which has a historical, as well as an intrinsic, importance—it will be best to allow the author to speak, as far as possible, for himself; and the originality and the piquancy of the argument will come out most clearly, if we follow it as it stands. The treatise consists of two parts, a dogmatical, and a historical; the first giving a possible theory of spirit, the second dealing with the actual experiences of Swedenborg.

A tangled metaphysical knot, which may be untied or cut asunder at will, presents itself first. There is nothing, we are told, that children, and people of all kinds up to philosophers, talk so much of as spirits, and nothing that one and all of them comprehend so imperfectly. What the child pretends to know perfectly, he is sure to know nothing of at all when he becomes a man; and, if he turn philosopher, he will be, at best, a sophist in the

very fact of our inability to conceive spirits clearly, shows that they do not belong to our daily experience, and that we infer them rather. But that does not prove that we infer wrongly. If we add up all the floating conceptions of spirit, we find the sum to be something like this-A spirit is a simple substance, possessed of reason, which can exist in a space occupied already by matter, and which, along with any number of its like, can never make a solid whole. Such a substance may be hardly intelligible to us, but it is not therefore impossible. The repulsive force residing in material atoms, and giving matter its impenetrability, is, strictly speaking, also unintelligible, but must be assumed to be more than possible. Let us then suppose a substance, in space, but not filling space, because its constituent forces are not those of matter; and we have an immaterial entity, inconceivable indeed, but whose impossibility is undemonstrable. If any one can ground the possibility of spirit more easily, Kant, who in his inquiries thinks he sees often an Alp before him where others see only a gentle ascent, will be happy to listen. But, the human soul is generally said to be a spiritual entity, and we are bound to suppose that the soul, as spirit, is all in the whole body, and all in every part of it. Any other supposition, as that the soul resides in one portion of the brain, can easily be proved to be absurd. Kant would like to assert the existence of spirits in the world, and to hold his own soul for one. But how it comes about that a material body and an immaterial spirit can make together one whole, passes his understanding, and he is not ashamed to confess it.

We get next a fragment of secret philosophy, designed to establish a communion with the spirit-world. Spirits having been supposed possible, it is easy to take the next step and suppose that they form among themselves in all their grades a spiritual company, a mundus intelligibilis. The soul of a man would thus belong to two worlds. At death,