"The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance...." I don't know German, so of course I have no idea what the original passage as Kant composed it would sound or feel like to someone who does. But Kant's prose has a reputation for, um, Teutonic heaviness. Yet unless his translators have given him a huge gift, this passage shows that he had a light poetic side. It seems to me to speak with great concision to the similarity/difference of Kant and Plato. They are both philosophers who distinguish between the apparently (or provisionally) real world on the one hand and the really real world on the oth...