logy in the
university of his native town. But natural science and philosophy proved
of far more powerful attraction, and, abandoning Divinity, he earned his
livelihood, first of all, by acting as a private tutor in the
neighbourhood of Koenigsberg, and afterwards by assuming a similar office
in his own university. He subsequently, at the age of forty-six, became
a professor of the Philosophical Faculty, a post he retained till his
death in 1804. The deep reverence and religious emotion which betrays
itself in Kant's ethical writings was probably due to the influence of
his parents. His father was venerable in his eyes as a man of moral
worth. Honesty, truth and domestic peace characterised his home. For
his mother the philosopher cherished the tenderest of recollections, and
to her religious feeling, detached as it was completely from formula and
system, he probably owes the fervour with which he speaks--as do Emerson
and Carlyle--of the sublimity of the moral laws, and of the infinite
dignity of a life lived in harmony with them. When he lost his father at
the age of twenty-two, he wrote in the family Bible: "On the 24th of
March my dearest father was called away by a blessed death. May God, who
has not vouchsafed him great pleasure in this life, grant him the joy
eternal!"

After a youth spent under the spell of such surroundings, we are not
surprised to learn that Kant was of a singularly grave, gentle and quiet
demeanour, which in old age tended to deepen into austerity and increased
conscientiousness, were that possible, in the fulfilment of his duties.
With the simple words, "It is the time," his servant Lampe called him
every morning at five minutes to five, and never to the end, according to
the testimony of his servant, was the summons disobeyed. In the
thirty-four years of his professorship he was reported to have been only
once absent from his chair, and that owing to indisposition.

Kant lived a solitary life; he never married. Like more than one eminent
man in the past and present, absolute want prevented his inviting the
woman he loved to share his lot. The world has just learnt that Tennyson
was engaged to his wife for twenty years, from her seventeenth to her
thirty-seventh year, owing again to stress of circumstances, and there is
living now one eminent man for whom, as for Immanuel Kant, comfort,
competence, and fame have come too late to allow of any share in the
blessing and joy of home.