IMMANUEL KANT (Prussia—1724-1804).
Another man of monastic temperament was Immanuel Kant, the eminent founder of German philosophy. Born at Königsberg in 1724, he lived there all his life. He did not travel; he did not even take flying trips to the great universities; the old city on the Pregel was good enough for him, and there he stayed and worked.
An honorable, dignified man, he was practically dead to the world and lived only that he might do honor to his goddess, Philosophy. Womankind seems to have had no attraction for him, and from social pleasures he rigidly abstained. His proper place was in a cloister, and no ascetic ever lived who apportioned out his time more regularly or did more conscientious work during the twenty-four hours of each day.
FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET VOLTAIRE (France—1694-1778).
Turning from the recluse to the men of the world, where can we find a more distinguished bachelor than Voltaire? Born in 1694, this witty Frenchman lived his memorable life among the gayest men and women of the world, and yet when his last hour came there was no wife to close his eyelids, there were no children to follow him to the tomb.
A weakling from birth, he was not baptized until he was nine months old. The Abbé de Chateauneuf, a cynical relative, gave him his first lessons in atheism and introduced him to Ninon de l'Enclos, the famous beauty. Ninon was so charmed with the boy that she left him a considerable sum of money in her will, with instructions that it be spent in furnishing his library.
The youth soon made his début as a poet and wit, but his father, who abhorred verses, was vexed at his notoriety and sent him to Holland. There the lad got entangled in a love affair and was promptly summoned home again. His father's next move was to banish him to the country, but he was again disappointed in thinking that his son would reform. Voltaire began to write an epic poem on Henry IV, and, his talents as a satirist being known, was suddenly arrested on the charge of lampooning Louis XIV, and imprisoned in the Bastile.
When he came out he began to write for the theaters, and as a playwright and a merciless critic of creeds and other cherished beliefs his life was spent. He was a favorite in society, and the fair sex petted him to his heart's content, yet he never married.
Mme. Denis, his niece, for whom he had a great affection, looked after his house at Ferney, near Geneva, and with her he spent his last days. It was she, too, who accompanied him to Paris in 1778 and who watched by his bedside when, overcome by the fatigues of his reception in the French capital—the greatest triumph of his life—he lay calmly, waiting for the angel of death to call him.