Immanuel Kant was a man of habit, living his life to a precise routine, townsfolk used to set their watches by his afternoon walk, as he followed the same route at the same time every day.
He never married, never fell ill, and never even travelled far from his home town of Koenigsberg in east Prussia. But Immanuel Kant was a great thinker. When he died at the age of 80, these words were inscribed on his tombstone:
"Two things fill my mind with ever
increasing wonder and awe,
The STARRY HEAVENS above me
and the MORAL LAW within me"
At the time when Napoleon was on the march through Europe, philosophy was at a stalemate. There were two opposing schools of thought. One said that all knowledge came from experience. The other said that human reason made sense of the world. Kant tried to bring the two together. He set about this by exploring how the human mind works and what reality really is.
The upshot was called a revolution in thinking. But because of his tedious and unfathomable writing style, it took a while for the brilliance to filter through.
According to Kant no-one can say for certain what reality is, only what it appears to be to them. This is because the human mind moulds reality into a form that makes sense to it.
Kant called space and time "irremovable goggles". They weren't "things" to be found out in the world, they were part of the mind's structuring system.
Kant said it was a moral necessity to believe in God, even though it was beyond the ability of human reason to prove God's existence.
He argued that a universal moral law governed people.
His theory on the solar system stated that most planets are inhabited.
A person's view of reality is distorted by how the mind works.
"Reason distinguishes right from wrong. If people went around killing each other, no-one would be left".
One day Kant stayed in to read a book and people all over town were late for their appointments.
"You can't know God... even though it is required to believe that He exists"
