And no wonder that Heine compared the little professor of Königsberg with the terrible Robespierre; the latter had merely killed a king, and a few thousand Frenchmen—which a German might forgive; but Kant, said Heine, had killed God, had undermined the most precious arguments of theology. “What a sharp contrast between the outer life of this man, and his destructive, world-convulsing thoughts! Had the citizens of Königsberg surmised the whole significance of those thoughts, they would have felt a more profound awe in the presence of this man than in that of an executioner,
