Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8Hubbard, Elbert
Philosophy
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8
Hubbard, Elbert
Philosophers
Across the disk of existence, each decade, there glide five hundred
million souls, and disappear forever in the dim and dusk of the eternity
that lies behind. Out of the bare handful that are remembered, we
cherish only the memories of those who stood alone and expressed their
honest, inmost thought. And this thought is, always and forever, the
thought of liberty. Exile, ostracism, death, have been their fate, and
on the smoke of martyr-fires their souls mounted to immortality.
Future generations often confuse these men with Deity, the Maker of the
Worlds. And thus do we arrive at truth by indirection, for in very fact
these were the Sons of God, vitalized by Divinity, part and parcel of
the Power that guides the planets on their way and holds the worlds in
space. Upon their tombs we carve a single word: _Savior_.
* * * * *
Kant was sixty years old before he was known to any extent beyond his
native town; but so fast then did his fame travel that at his death it
was recognized that the greatest thinker of the world had passed away.
Kant founded no school; but Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herde and
Schopenhauer were all his children--and all but Schopenhauer showed
their humanity by denouncing him, for men are prone to revile that which
has benefited them most. Kant marks an epoch and all thinkers who came
after him are his debtors. His philosophy has passed into the current
coin of knowledge.
Kant's lifelong researches revolve around four propositions:
1. Who am I?
2. What am I?
3. What can I do?
4. What can I know?
The answer to Number Four is that I can not know anything. That is to
say, the wise man is the man who knows that he does not know. And this
disposes of Number One and Number Two, leaving only Number Three for our
consideration. It took, however, a good many years and a vast amount of
study and writing for Kant to thus simplify. For years he toiled with
algebraic formulas and syllogistic theorems before he concluded that the
best wisdom of life lies in simplification, not complexity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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