remain unimpeached by such caprices, whether of an
individual or of a great nation; and England would still be in the
right to import the philosophy, however late in the day, if it were
true even (which I doubt greatly) that she _is_ importing it.

Both truth and value there certainly _is_ in one part of the Kantian
philosophy; and that part is its foundation. I had intended, at this
point, to introduce an outline of the transcendental philosophy--not,
perhaps, as entering by logical claim of right into any biographical
sketch, but as a very allowable digression in the record of that man's
life to whom, in the way of hope and of profound disappointment, it
had been so memorable an object. For two or three years before I
mastered the language of Kant,[22] it had been a pole-star to my
hopes, and _in hypothesi_ agreeably to the uncertain plans of
uncertain knowledge, the luminous guide to my future life--as a life
dedicated and set apart to philosophy. Such it was some years _before_
I knew it: for, at least ten long years _after_ I came into a
condition of valueing its true pretensions and measuring its
capacities, this same 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. I belonged to a reptile race, if the
wings by which we had sometimes _seemed_ to mount, and the buoyancy
which had _seemed_ to support our flight, were indeed the fantastic
delusions which he represented them. Such, and so deep and so abiding
in its influence upon my life, having been the influence of this
German philosophy, according to all logic of proportions, in selecting
the objects of my notice, I might be excused for setting before the
reader, in its full array, the analysis of its capital sections.
However, in any memorial of a life which professes to keep in view
(though but as a secondary purpose) any regard to popular taste, the
logic of proportions must bend, after all, to the law of the
occasion--to the proprieties of time and place. For the present,
therefore, I shall restrict myself to the few sentences in which it
may be proper to gratify the curiosity of _some_ readers, the two or
three in a hundred, as to the peculiar distinctions of this
philos