When the flaming blaze of the French Revolution was reddening the skies of Europe, and inaugurating the restoration of the rights of man, _Kant_ was sitting in his study at Königsberg, his heart beating strongly in sympathy with the Revolution, for he saw in it a hopeful turn of the times. An old man of nearly seventy, he followed the events with most passionate interest. _Varnhagen_ records in his Memoirs, based on the stories of _Staegemann_, that, when the proclamation of the Republic was announced in the newspapers, _Kant_, with tears in his eyes, said to some friends: “Now can I say with Simeon, ‘Now dost Thou, O Lord, dismiss Thy servant in peace, because mine eyes have seen Thy Salvation’ ” (_H. Hettner_, Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrh. III, 4th ed., 3, 2, 1894, p. 38). While on the other side of the Rhine the Jacobins were doing their bloody work of political liberation, the German philosopher, the herald of a new era and an ardent admirer of _Rousseau_, sat in his study labouring for man’s intellectual liberation. To give man the right of autonomous self-determination in action and thought was the work of his life. Autonomy was indeed to him “ ‘the source’ of all dignity of man and of every rational nature” (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, II). And hence it was that his ardent followers beheld in him “the first perfect model of a really free German, one who had purged himself from every trace of Roman absolutism, dogmatism, and anti-individualism” (_H. St. Chamberlain_, Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrh., 8th ed., 1907, II, 1127).