[Born at Königsberg, in Prussia, 1724. Died there, 1804. Aged 80.]
The founder of a new philosophy in Germany. After twelve years’
meditation, he produced, in the space of five months, his celebrated
“Criticism of Pure Reason.” His main theory is, that there is only one
source of knowledge, viz., the union of subject and object; that is to
say, our knowledge is partly _mental_, partly _physical_,--one half of
it coming from the mind, or _subject_, the other half from the _object_.
The mind has its own forms which it gives to objects. Time and space are
forms of the mind, not things existing out of it. By thus restoring to
mind its independent activity he was able to oppose Locke, proving that
we have ideas independently of experience, and to oppose Hume, by
proving that these ideas have a character of universality, necessity,
and irresistibility. Hume insisted that the understanding is
treacherous. Kant declared it is only limited. For a time, Kant’s
philosophy superseded every other system in the Protestant Universities
of Germany. A man of high intellectual endowment; his life rigorously
philosophical. He lived and died a type of the German Professor. The
cathedral clock of Königsberg, which town he never once quitted during
his long life, was not more punctual, it was said, than Immanuel Kant.
[By Fried. Hagemann. The original in marble is in the University of
Königsberg. F. Hagemann was a pupil of G. Schadow; he was born in
1773, and died at Berlin in 1806. He executed this bust at
Königsberg.]