This great idea, which appears in Rousseau rather as a stroke of insight, an intuition of genius—lifting him above his first thoughts and insensibly changing their meaning—was grasped by Kant as the principle of a new philosophy and worked out in a comprehensive system that dealt with all the great problems of thought and life. Kant, indeed, seemed, like Rousseau, to begin on the plane of eighteenth-century individualism, but, influenced as he was by the philosophy of Leibnitz, he from the first conceived the individual as in himself universal; or, to speak more exactly, as having a universal principle realized in him. Thus, though in one aspect of his being man is a finite object among other objects, confined within limits of space and time, and forming only a link in the chain of natural causation, in another aspect of it, as a conscious self, he is emancipated from all these limitations. For—such is Kant’s argument—a knowing subject, for whom the whole finite world, including his own finite existence, is an object of knowledge, cannot himself be comprehended in that world or limited by any of its conditions. As there can be no world of objects except for a self, it is impossible that such a self should be merely one of these objects. Thus, as knowing, or capable of knowing, all things, man cannot be identified with any of them; or if, from one point of view, as an individual, he is so identified, yet he has within him a universal principle that carries him beyond the limits of his individuality. And this contrast shows itself also in his practical life. For if as an object he appears to be but an animal organism, moved by the impressions of pleasure and pain which he receives from other objects, yet in his inner moral life man is revealed to himself as a self-determining subject, emancipated from all sensuous motives and from the necessity of nature which they bring with them, and conscious of subordination only to the law of duty, which is the law of his own reason. And that law, in spite of every pressure of circumstance from without, and of every impulse of passion from within, he knows that he ought to obey, and therefore he knows that he _can_ obey it. Thus, in Kant’s theory, the two extreme views of humanity, as natural and as spiritual, as limited to a finite individuality, hemmed in by necessities on every side, and yet as possessing a universal capacity of knowing, and an absolute power of self-determination, these two views are presented in sharp antithesis, and at the same time held together as different aspects of one life. In fact, we have here, as it were, compressed into a nutshell, the result of the whole history of eighteenth-century individualism, which began by depressing man and ended by exalting him; which, with one of its voices, seemed to reduce him to the level of an animal, a mere part of the partial world, a transitory phenomenal existence among other phenomena; and