The Kantian Centennial [pp. 394-424]

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.
theists, by showing that the God whom they supplemented to
philosophy by faith is demonstrated to be forever unknown and
unknowable by the a posteriori discovery of the doctrine of the
conservation of force. Mr. Spencer and Mr. Tyndall are confessedly not over-learned in the "Critique of Pure Reason," but the
First Principles of the one and the eloquent philosophic apostrophes of the other give decisive evidence that the "Critique
of Pure Reason" has forced philosophers of every school to ask
and answer questions which were formerly either totally neglected or superficially solved.
The influence of Kant upon the Continent, it is almost superfluous to say, has been far more pervasive and permanent. We
may think as we please in respect to the truth or falsehood, the
reasonableness or the unreasonableness, of the three or four
great schools which succeeded one another in Germany so rapidly, and each for the time occupied the attention of so many
acute thinkers and eloquent expounders. But we cannot doubt
that these discussions have deepened and quickened the thinking of three generations of able and learned men as no other
movements have done in either ancient or modern times, and that
the consequences both direct and indirect have been most valuable in the lectures and treatises with which they have enriched
modern literature. We may think or speak lightly of German
philosophy, if we choose, and in some respects perhaps with
reason. We may wonder to see how rapid has been the growth,
how wide-spread the influence, and how sudden the decay of one
of its systems after another, after each had taken possession of a
generation of youth and had controlled the theology, the jurisprudence, the politics, the literature, and the art of a quarter of
a century. One thing we cannot deny, however, and that is the
enormous "potential energy" which was hidden in the single
treatise which a century ago was launched into being by this
solitary thinker in a remote city lying on the borders of western
civilization, from which he had never travelled more than some
one or two hundred English miles. We find, however, that
these systems as they have succeeded and in a certain sense displaced one another have been concerned with substantially the
same questions which Kant propounded at the first, and are consequently connected with the "Critique of Pure Reason" by an
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