stitutional, but on one occasion his time-table was disrupted for several days; this was when he
was reading Emile. He said that he had to read Rousseau's books several times, because, at a first
reading, the beauty of the style prevented him from noticing the matter. Although he had been
brought up as a pietist, he was a Liberal both in politics and in theology; he sympathized with the
French Revolution until the Reign of Terror, and was a believer in democracy. His philosophy, as
we shall see, allowed an appeal to the heart against the cold dictates of theoretical reason, which
might, with a little exaggeration, be regarded as a pedantic version of the Savoyard Vicar. His
principle that every man is to be regarded as an end in himself is a form of the doctrine of the
Rights of Man; and his love of freedom is shown in his saying (about children as well as adults)
that "there can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of a man should be subject to the
will of another."
Kant's early works are more concerned with science than with philosophy. After the earthquake of
Lisbon he wrote on the theory of earthquakes; he wrote a treatise on wind, and a short essay on the
question whether the west wind in Europe is moist because it has crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
Physical geography was a subject in which he took great interest.
The most important of his scientific writings is his General Natural History and Theory of the
Heavens ( 1755), which anticipates Laplace's nebular hypothesis, and sets forth a possible origin
of the solar system. Parts of this work have a remarkable Miltonic sublimity. It has the merit of
inventing what proved a fruitful hypothesis, but it does not, as Laplace did, advance serious
arguments in its favour. In parts it is purely fanciful, for instance in the doctrine that all planets are
inhabited, and that the most distant planets have the best inhabitants--a view to be praised for its
terrestrial modesty, but not supported by any scientific grounds.
At a time when he was more troubled by the arguments of sceptics than he was earlier or later, he
wrote a curious work called Dreams of a Ghost-seer, Illustrated by the Dreams of Metaphysics
( 1766). The "ghost-seer" is Swedenborg, whose mystical system had been presented to the world
in an enormous work, of which four copies were sold, three to unknown purchasers and one to
Kant. Kant, half seriously and half in jest, suggests that Swedenborg's system, which