Kant in Baroja: El árbol de la ciencia and the Critique of Pure Reason.

This article discusses that literary critic Donald Shaw pointed out philosopher Immanuel Kant as the originator of the crisis of confidence that gripped the later nineteenth century. Kant shattered forever the rationalist foundations of eighteenth century optimism. The writers of the 1898 generation, much given to the study of modern philosophy, felt keenly the erosion of confidence in conventional ways of thinking that Kant's critique of rationalism and his resolute circumscription of the human mind's ability to know the world had initiated.