IV. INTRODUCTION TO KANT
BY PROFESSOR RALPH BARTON PERRY
IT is generally admitted that Kant is one of the great epoch-making philosophers, like Socrates and Descartes. There are two things that are universally true of intellectual epoch-makers: first, they embody in themselves certain general tendencies of their age, which are usually due to a reaction against the more pronounced tendencies of the previous age; second, their thought is peculiarly germinal, and among their followers assumes a maturer form, in which the originators would scarcely recognize it as their own. Let us consider these two aspects of the philosophy of Kant.