Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. cf. Works VIII, 103, 398.

Ueber ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen. cf. Works XIII, 13, note.

Ueber das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee. cf. Works V, 65.

Geschichte und Naturbeschreibung der merkwürdigen Vorfälle des Erdbebens etc. cf. Posth. Works II, 134, note. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. cf. Works VII, 181; VIII, 264.

Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. cf. Works X, 160. Kritik der Urtheilskraft. cf. Works XI, 293, note. De Mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis Forma et Principiis. cf. Works IV, 328.

Lectures on Physical Geography. cf. Works VIII, 93. It is safe to say that De Quincey knew the rest of Kant's essays in the volumes in which the above appeared. He had full acquaintance therefore with Kant's system, and he says frankly that he felt himself a master of it. "On some future day it is very possible that I may trouble. you with a short exposition of the Transcendental Philosophy, so framed that, without foregoing one iota of technical rigour, it shall convey, for the first time, to merely English ears, a real account of what that philosophy is." Here then, if anywhere, is the opportunity to study the intellectual character of De Quincey.

In order to understand the influence of Kant upon him, one trait of De Quincey's nature, already mentioned, should be emphasized. He was in no sense skeptical; his mind was religious and made for belief. It is for this

1 cf. Posth. Works I, 195 and K. Werke II, 145.

2 Works VIII, 87.

reason that his opinions on all important ideas in politics, religion or philosophy, changed so little. He had what might be called a high order of curiosity; a quality which allowed him to follow many ideas to their logical extremes, to see them in their abstract truth; yet often he shrank back from the fullest consequences, not logically, but with his feelings and beliefs. It is in this light that De Quincey's relation to Kant has a particular interest. No mind in the realm of pure speculation had so impressed him as the mind of Kant; it is doubtful whether Shakespeare or Milton had so affected him. From the conclusions of the Critical Philosophy he could not escape; he saw how irresistibly it led to the destruction of what he had believed necessary and final elements in the whole interpretation of the world. The regions which Kant placed in the unknown were precisely those in which De Quincey loved to let his mind wander; not only the whole enthusiasm and daring of De Quincey's imagination, the deepest thing in him, but the objects of his dearest beliefs appeared to him as a mere dream of the mind; even the laws of the world were, according to Kant, only the laws of the human spirit itself. The world which our own reason and senses shape is our world. Of anything more, of the reality of things apart from us, we can form no idea. This thought did not merely rouse De Quincey's intellect; it completely overcame him.

He has sketched his feelings after his first reading of the Transcendental Philosophy in a paper on German Studies and Kant in Particular, etc.1 At the time when German literature seemed to promise him everything,*

1 Works II, 86.

2 De Quincey was then twenty years old.

Kant stood as "the very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden". In Kant he had been taught to expect a new creative philosophy. "I looked confidingly", he writes, "to see the great vistas and avenues of truth laid open to the philosophic inquirer. Alas! all was a dream. Six weeks' study was sufficient to close my hopes in that quarter for ever". "For ten years afterwards," he writes a little farther on, "this philosophy shed the gloom of something like misanthropy upon my views and estimates of human nature; for man was an abject animal, if the limitations which Kant assigned to the motions of his speculative reason were as absolute and hopeless as, under his scheme of the understanding and his genesis of its powers, too evidently they were"; and farther still: "The profound shock with which I was repelled from German philosophy tinged thenceforwards my temper with cynical disgust towards man in certain aspects". Years later, when speaking of the immortality of the soul, he says with a kind of sadness; "Listen to no intellectual argument. One argument there is, one only there is, of philosophical value; an argument drawn from the moral nature of man: an argument of Immanuel Kant's. The rest are dust and ashes".1

It is in this personal feeling that we are to seek the cause of De Quincey's failure to understand the constructive work of Kant, and perhaps also a few outbursts of pettiness on De Quincey's part. Writing in 1836, thirty years after his first study of the Critical Philosophy, he finds it still "a philosophy of destruction". "It offers nothing seducing to human aspirations, nothing splendid to the human imagination, nothing even positive and

1 Works II, 402.

affirmative to the human understanding".1 That expresses the real character of De Quincey; his critical talent is not great, he is at heart poet and dreamer. His instinct is for the sublime, for the feeling of certainty, for a belief that satisfies hope and yields something "splendid to the imagination". An idea must content him. He goes so far as to say that he cannot imagine why the Germans have received the Transcendental Philosophy so enthusiastically, "except from profound incomprehension of its meaning and utter blindness to its drift". On this ground De Quincey has been criticised very severely by Mr. J. H. Stirling. Mr. Stirling gives De Quincey little credit for even a knowledge of Kant, and draws a most unfavorable contrast between Kant's stern labor and pursuit of truth, and the gossiping, fanciful and ineffectual character of De Quincey. But we are much more ready to agree in many respects with a reply to Mr. Stirling by Mr. S. H. Hodgson. Mr. Hodgson points out that De Quincey had approached Kant with the ideas of the Church of England, and from that point of view calls Kant destructive. Yet it was more. It was not a mere sweeping away of "the speculative foundations of theology" as Mr. Hodgson expresses it. It was no mere logical experience. The forms of the English church and the ideas of Protestantism were so bound up with the imagination and spiritual sympathies of De Quincey, with a world that was to him as real as the external one,*

1 Works II, 86.

2 Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1867: De Quincey and Coleridge upon Kant. 3 In De Quincey and his Friends, 337 ff.

4 cf. Autobiographic Sketches; Works I, 44, 46 ff., as an example of the way the ritual and forms of the English service had taken possession of De Quincey's imagination.

that Kant seemed to him, for the time at least, to have upturned the very foundations of things.

Mr. Hodgson describes it well: "De Quincey's position is that of a man forced to give an unwilling assent to the main conceptions of a system, which he regards with dismay, as destroying, or at least endangering, the best hopes and aspirations af humanity". Whatever apparent contradictions there are in De Quincey's criticism of Kant, are to be traced to this conflict between the logical conclusions which he felt compelled to draw, and the most profound feelings and desires of his nature. That De Quincey appreciated, at least in part, the constructive side of Kant's chief Critique, we shall see farther on; but he certainly failed to recognize the essentially positive character of the rest of Kant's philosophy. He refers to Kant's proof of the immortality of the soul, and the demonstration, on moral grounds, of the belief in a Deity (VIII, 261 f.). He speaks of the "emphatic truth and grandeur" with which Kant treated the moral nature; but this side of Kant's philosophy does not seem to have restored fully what the first destroyed.

From the same standpoint we are to explain certain violent and petulant outbursts of De Quincey. He speaks of Kant's "Ghoulish creed";" he says that Kant "rejoiced in the prospect of absolute and ultimate annihilation"; he allows himself to write: "The King of Prussia, though a personal friend of Kant's, found himself obliged to level his state thunders at some of his doctrines and terrified him in his advance; else I am persuaded that Kant would have formally delivered Atheism from the professor's

De Quincey and his Friends. 340.

2 Works II, 155.