HUME TO HEGEL with humility I would pick on the left hand and say, Father, grant me that; absolute truth is for thee alone (Gesammelte Werke, ed Lachmann and Muncker, XIII 23) Kant One man who devoted his whole life to the pursuit of absolute truth was Immanuel Kant: indeed, apart from this pursuit, there is little to tell about his biography Born in 1724 in Koănigsberg, which was then in the eastern part of Prussia, he lived all his life in the town of his birth From 1755 until 1770 he was a Privatdozent or lecturer in Koănigsberg University, and from 1770 until his death in 1804 he held the professorship of logic and metaphysics there He never travelled or married or held public oYce, and the story of his life is the story of his ideas Kant was brought up in a devout Lutheran family, but he later became liberal in his theological views, though perforce regular in religious observance He was always a man of strict life and constant habit, notorious for exact punctuality, rising at Wve and retiring at ten, lecturing in the morning from seven to eight, and then writing until a late and ample luncheon The citizens of Koănigsberg used to joke that they could set their watches by his appearance for his afternoon constitutional As a university student he was taught by a disciple of WolV, but his own early interests were more scientiWc than philosophical, and as a Privatdozent he lectured not only on logic and metaphysics but on subjects as diverse as anthropology, geography, and mineralogy His Wrst books, too, were written on scientiWc subjects, most notably the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens of 1755 From 1860 onwards he began to devote himself seriously to philosophy, but for the next twenty years the works he published were of a cautious and conventional kind In 1762 he wrote a short and rather superWcial essay on the traditional syllogistic, criticizing the unnecessary subtlety (‘Die falsche SptizWndigkeit’, as the essay’s title has it) of its customary presentation In the same year he wrote The Only Possible Ground for a Demonstration of God’s Existence, in which, while rejecting three of the standard proofs of God’s existence, he argued, in the spirit of WolV and Duns Scotus, that if there are any possible beings at all there must be a perfect being to provide the ground of this possibility 100