Both truth and value there certainly _is_ in one part of the Kantian philosophy; and that part is its foundation. I had intended, at this point, to introduce an outline of the transcendental philosophy--not, perhaps, as entering by logical claim of right into any biographical sketch, but as a very allowable digression in the record of that man's life to whom, in the way of hope and of profound disappointment, it had been so memorable an object. For two or three years before I mastered the language of Kant,[18] it had been a pole-star to my hopes, and _in hypothesi_, agreeably to the uncertain plans of uncertain knowledge, the luminous guide to my future life--as a life dedicated and set apart to philosophy. Such it was some years _before_ I knew it: for at least ten long years _after_ I came into a condition of valuing its true pretensions and measuring its capacities, this same philosophy shed the gloom of something like misanthropy upon my views and estimates of human nature; for man was an abject animal if the limitations which Kant assigned to the motions of his speculative reason were as absolute and hopeless as, under _his_ scheme of the understanding and _his_ genesis of its powers, too evidently they were. I belonged to a reptile race, if the wings by which we had sometimes _seemed_ to mount, and the buoyancy which had _seemed_ to support our flight, were indeed the fantastic delusions which he represented them. Such, and so deep and so abiding in its influence upon my life, having been the influence of this German philosophy, according to all logic of proportions, in selecting the objects of my notice, I might be excused for setting before the reader, in its full array, the analysis of its capital sections. However, in any memorial of a life which professes to keep in view (though but as a secondary purpose) any regard to popular taste, the logic of proportions must bend, after all, to the law of the occasion--to the proprieties of time and place. For the present, therefore, I shall restrict myself to the few sentences in which it may be proper to gratify the curiosity of _some_ readers, the two or three in a hundred, as to the peculiar distinctions of this philosophy. Even to these two or three out of each hundred I shall not venture to ascribe a larger curiosity than with respect to the most general "whereabouts" of its position--from what point it starts, whence and from what aspect it surveys the ground, and by what links from this starting point it contrives to connect itself with the main objects of philosophic inquiry.