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A pupil here interposed, and asked the master if this was not equally true of men, and the answer was, “I accept the amendment–it certainly is true of all men I ever saw in courtrooms.”

“Does death end all?”

“No,” said Kant; “there is the litigation over the estate.”

Kant’s constant reiteration that he had no use for doctors, lawyers and preachers, we can well imagine did not add to his popularity. As for his reasoning concerning lawyers, we can all, probably, recall a few jug-shaped attorneys who fill the Kant requirements–takers of contingent fees and stirrers-up of strife: men who watch for vessels on the rocks and lure with false lights the mariner to his doom. But matters since Kant’s day have changed considerably for the better. There is a demand now for a lawyer who is a businessman and who will keep people out of trouble instead of getting them in. And we also have a few physicians who are big enough to tell a man there is nothing the matter with him, if they think so, and then charge him accordingly–in inverse ratio to the amount of medicine administered.

And while we no longer refer to the clergyman as our spiritual adviser, except, perhaps, in way of pleasantry, he surely is useful as a social promoter.

* * * * *

The parents of Kant were Lutherans–punctilious and pious. They were descended from Scotch soldiers who had come over there two hundred years before and settled down after the war, just as the Hessians settled down and went to farming in Pennsylvania, their descendants occasionally becoming Daughters of the Revolution, because their grandsires fought with Washington.

This Scotch strain gave a sturdy bias to the Kants–these Lutherans were really rebels, and as every one knows, there are only two ways of dealing with a religious Scotchman–agree with him or kill him.

Most people said that Kant was supremely stubborn–he himself called it “firmness in the right.” Once, when a couple of calumniators were thinking up all the bad things they could say about him, one of them exclaimed, “He isn’t five feet high!”

“Liar!” came the shrill voice of the Philosopher, who had accidentally overheard them, “Liar! I am exactly five feet!” And he drew himself up, and struck his staff proudly and defiantly on the ground.

Which reminds one of the story told of Professor Josiah Royce, who once rang up six fares on the register when he wished to stop a Boston street-car. When the conductor protested, the philosopher called him “up-start,” “curmudgeon” and “nincompoop,” and showed the fallacy of his claim that thirty cents had been lost, since nobody had found it. Moreover, he offered to prove his proposition by algebraic equation, if one of the gentlemen present had chalk and blackboard on his person.

Once Kant was looking at the flowers in a beautiful garden. But instead of looking through the iron pickets, he stooped over and was squinting through the key-hole of the lock. A student coming along asked him why he didn’t look through the pickets and thus get a perfect view.

“Go on, you fool,” was the stern reply; “I am studying the law of optics–the unobstructed vision reveals too much–the vivid view is only gotten through a small aperture.”

All of which was believed to be a sudden inspiration in way of reply that came to the great professor when caught doing an absent-minded thing. That Kant was not above a little pious prevarication is shown by a story he himself tells. He was never inside of a church once during the last fifty years of his life. But when he became Chancellor of the University, one of his duties was to lead a procession to the Cathedral, where certain formal religious services were held. Kant tried to have the exercises in a hall, but failing in this, he did his duty, and marched like a pigmy drum-major at the head of the cavalcade.