His ethical
treatises caused him to be consulted from the most distant lands on
questions of moral import. It is on record that many of his
correspondents paid insufficient postage upon their letters--a fact which
meant considerable loss for the philosopher. Indeed, so habitual was the
forgetfulness of these ethical sensitives that Kant at length refused to
take their letters in. After some thirty years of professorship in his
own university his marvellous powers began to fail; his memory served him
no longer; his great mind could think no more the thoughts sublime. The
keen senses grew dull, and the light of his "glad blue eyes" went out.
His bodily frame, which by assiduous care he had maintained as a worthy
organ of his mind, sank into weakness. His last years, his last hours
even, are described by his well-beloved disciple and friend Wasianski
with a faithful and pathetic minuteness which, in the view of some of the
great thinker's deepest admirers, might well have been less microscopic.
The spectacle of a great mind losing itself at length in the feebleness
of age, almost the imbecility of second childhood, might well, they
consider, have been withdrawn from the vulgar gaze. "Yet," as the late
Prof. Wallace most truly remarks, "for those who remember, amid the
decline of the flesh, the noble spirit which inhabited it, it is a sacred
privilege to watch the failing life and visit the sick chamber of
Immanuel Kant." [1]

On the 12th of February, 1804, in his eightieth year, he passed away, the
victim of no special ailment or disease, but exhausted by the life of
deep and strenuous thought upon the most profound and sacred problems
which can agitate the mind of man. Simple and unostentatious to a degree
during his life, the great master left instructions that he was to be
buried quietly in the early morning. But for once his wish was
disregarded, and amid the mourning of his Alma Mater, his townsfolk and
the neighbourhood around, he was laid to rest in the choir of the
University Church, which during life he would never enter. As with Kant
so with Darwin, all men instinctively feel--even the most narrow of
sectarians--that the lives of such men were--I will not say
religious--but religion, and so they lay them at last within the shadow
of their altars as the worthiest and best of the race. It shows us how
deeply seated is the ethical emotion in man; it shows us that the
religion of every man at his best mom