Thus we come round again to dinner, and the reader has now an accurate
picture of the course of Kant's day; the rigid monotony of which was
not burthensome to him; and probably contributed, with the uniformity
of his diet, and other habits of the same regularity, to lengthen his
life. On this consideration, indeed, he had come to regard his health
and his old age as in a great measure the product of his own exertions.
He spoke of himself often under the figure of a gymnastic artist, who
had continued for nearly fourscore years to support his balance upon
the slack-rope of life, without once swerving to the right or to the
left. In spite of every illness to which his constitutional tendencies
had exposed him, he still kept his position in life triumphantly.
However, he would sometimes observe sportively, that it was really
absurd, and a sort of insult to the next generation for a man to live
so long, because he thus interfered with the prospects of younger
people.
This anxious attention to his health accounts for the great interest
which he attached to all new discoveries in medicine, or to new ways of
theorizing on the old ones. As a work of great pretension in both
classes, he set the highest value upon the theory of the Scotch
physician Brown, or (as it is usually called, from the Latin name of
its author,) the Brunonian Theory.
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