Neo-Kantianism is the prevalent school of modern philosophy. The literature about Kant has grown to unheard-of proportions. But if you attempt to analyse the colossal mass that has been written upon Kant, and put the question to yourself, what has really been left to us of Kant's teaching, then to your great amazement you will have to reply: Nothing at all. There is an extraordinary, incredibly famous name--Kant, and there is positively not a single Kantian thesis which in an uninterpreted form would have survived till our day. I say in an uninterpreted form, for interpretations resolve at bottom into arbitrary recastings, which often have not even an outward resemblance to the original. These interpretations began while Kant was still alive. Fichte gave the first example. It is well known that Kant reacted, demanding that his teaching should be understood not in the spirit but in the letter. And Kant was, naturally, quite right. Of two things one: either you take his teaching as it is, or you invent your own. But the fate of all thinkers who have been destined to give their names to an epoch is similar: they have been interpreted, recast, till they are unrecognisable. For after a short time had elapsed, it became clear that their ideas were so overburdened with contradictions, that in the form in which they emerged from the hands of their creators, they are absolutely unacceptable. Indeed, all the critics who had not made up their minds beforehand to be orthodox Kantians, came to the conclusion that Kant had not proved a single one of his fundamental propositions. Something stronger may be said. By virtue of the fact that Kant, owing to the central position which he occupied, attracted much attention to himself and was forced to submit to very careful criticism, there gradually emerged a truth which might have been known beforehand: that Kant's teaching is a mass of contradictions. The sum-total of more than a century's study of Kant may be resumed in a few words. Although he was not afraid of the most crying contradictions, he did not have the smallest degree of success in proving the correctness of his teaching. With an extraordinary power and depth of mind, with all the originality, boldness, and talent of his constructions, he really provided nothing that might be indisputably called a positive acquisition of philosophy. I repeat that I am not expressing my own opinion. I am only reckoning the sum-total of the opinions of the German critics of Kant, of those same critics who built him a monument _aere perennius._