Cecelia Guilickson, age 16, of Lowell, Mass., for her question:

WHO WAS IMMANUAL KANT?

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who lived from 1724 to 1804. Many scholars consider him to have been the most influential thinker of modern times.

Kant received his education at the Collegium Fredericiaum and the University of Konigsberg. At the college he studied chiefly the classics and at the university he studied physics and mathematics.

When his father died, Kant was compelled to halt his university career and earn his living as a private tutor. But aided by a friend later, he resumed his studies and obtained his doctorate. Then for 15 years he taught at the university, lecturing first on science and mathematics, but gradually enlarging his field of concentration to cover almost all branches of philosophy.

Although the lectures and other works Kant wrote during this period established his reputation as an original philosopher, he did not receive a chair at the university until 1770 at the age of 46 when he was made professor of logic and metaphysics.

For the next 27 years he continued to teach and attract large numbers of students to Konigsberg. His unorthodox religious teachings, which were based on rationalism rather than revelation, brought him into conflict with the government of Prussia. In 1792 he was forbidden to teach or write on religious subjects. Kant obeyed this order for five years until the death of the king and then he felt released from his obligation.

The keystone of Kant's philosophy, sometimes called critical philosophy, is contained in his "Critique of Pure Reason" in which he examined the bases of human knowledge and created an individual epistemology.. Kant believed in the fundamental freedom of the individual. This freedom he did not regard as the lawless freedom of anarchy, but rather as the freedom of self government, the freedom to obey consciously the laws of the university of revealed by reason.

Kant's work rejects the idea that all knowledge is merely experience. Experience sends only disordered sensations through the senses. There must be a form of knowledge that is separate from experience and gives order to these senations.

For Kant, knowledge is pure reason, and the source of knowledge is the mind of man. The external world, known only through sense experiences, is organized by the mind into knowledge.

Man's mind then, according to Kant, is not merely a receiver of sensations, as Locke believed. Rather, the mind is an active, thinking organ that selects and arranges sensations into ideas and finally into knowledge.

Kant deals with morality. Ail men are born with a moral sense, said Kant, which, like faith in God, goes beyond reason. Man should be true to this sense of doing his duty, even if it interferes with his individual happiness.