Kant and Newtonian Science: The Pre-Critical Period Author(s): Ronald Calinger Source: Isis, Vol. 70, No.

3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 348-362 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/231373 . Accessed: 29/06/2011 07:56
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Kant The

and

Newtonian
Pre-Critical

Science:
Period

By Ronald Calinger* EWTONIAN IDEAS were vigorously developed and disseminated in Prussia during the mid-eighteenth century. The cental figures in that movement were Maupertuis and Euler, who had been invited to join the Berlin Academy of Sciences by Frederick the Great. Both men made major contributions to Newtonian dynamics and the method of fluxions, and both were effective polemicists against the native Wolffian philosophers, who opposed some imported Newtonian ideas. The two sides particularly disagreed over the theory of matter and the general application of Leibniz's conservation of vis viva principle.' Bearing as it did on the fundamental principles of mechanics, this research and debate spread beyond Berlin and engaged other thinkers, among them Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) of Konigsberg. This essay will examine Kant's early response to Newtonian science. Specifically, it will investigate the sources of his scientific thought and describe his changing and deepening understanding of Newtonian science during his pre-Critical period-that is, before the 1770s when he began his enterprise of the critique of pure reason. While it would be misleading to represent Kant as a creative scientist, he was a profound philosopher, well versed in the physical and mathematical sciences, who strongly influenced the development of scientific thought in Prussia. Indeed, he was probably more attentive to the results of the scientific investigation of nature than any other philosopher of the mature Enlightenment. His response to Newtonian ideas will be put in the fuller context of the several natural philosophies to which he was exposed and whose influence he bore from the beginning of his academic career. His eclecticism embraced selected ideas from Cartesian science and from Wolffian philosophy, which he described as the "daughter" of the Leibnizian philosophy.
NT

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION AND EARLY WRITINGS

When in 1740 Kant entered the University of Konigsberg, the philosophy of Christian Wolff, which had only recently triumphed in Prussia, was already disintegrating, even in the hands of its disciples. They included Kant's teacher Martin Knutzen
*Department of History and Political Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12181. The author wishes to thank Professors Lewis W. Beck (Rochester), Justus Harnack (SUCNYBrockport), Robert Bartlow (Topeka), the Isis reviewers, and his colleagues Joseph Brown and Roderick Brumbaugh at Rensselaer for their. helpful criticisms and suggestions. 'For information on the scientific advances and polemics in Prussia at mid-century, see Ronald Calinger, "The Newtonian-Wolffian Controversy (1741-1759)," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1969, 30:310-331; Ronald Calinger, "Euler's Letters to a Princess of Germany as an Expression of his Mature Scientific Outlook," Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1976, 15:211-233; Irving I. Polonoff, Force, Cosmos, Monads and Other Themes of Kant's Early Thought (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1973), pp. 72-105; C. Truesdell, Essays in the History of Mechanics (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1968); and Edward Winter, ed., Die Registres der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften (1746-1766) (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957).
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(1713-175 1), the ablest of Konigsberg's professors. Knutzen, who taught philosophy, mathematics, and natural science, used Newton, whom he had read in the original, to correct Wolff s conclusions. To keep abreast of the latest scientific research Knutzen corresponded regularly with the Swiss-born mathematician and theoretical physicist Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), a member of the Berlin Academy since 1741. By giving his talented student access to his personal library, supplemented by personal instruction, he encouraged Kant to read Newton as well as other major contemporary works in the exact sciences. These initiatives are reflected in Kant's own early lectures and writings and indicate that from 1746 to 1762 he had a greater predilection for natural philosophy (the intersection of philosophy and natural science) than for general philosophy. At the end of his six years of study at Konigsberg, Kant wrote an essay, "Thoughts on the True Estimate of Living Forces" (1746-1747),2 which was to be his first published work. This essay reveals that he had acquired at least some knowledge of basic Cartesian, Newtonian, and Wolffian ideas. Although intended as an improvement upon Leibnizian ideas and written largely from the standpoint of Wolffian inquiry, it developed ideas from the three different sciences in a selective and selfreliant manner and indeed occasionally mediated between the Newtonian and Wolffian positions. The underpinning for the first published essay was the theory of substance or, more narrowly, the theory of matter. Kant had three views of primal material substance from which to choose. The first was the Cartesian corpuscular theory that equated matter with extension (res extensa). The other two views were dichotomous: Newton and his disciples presupposed the existence of indivisible, impenetrable, and passive atoms,3 while Leibniz proposed metaphysical and animistically endowed points of force and perception called monads. Like most of his Prussian contemporaries, Kant rejected both Newton's passive atoms and the simple Cartesian equation of matter with extension. Instead, he based his nascent theory of substance on a physical monad that was Leibniz's monad shorn of its animistic properties but not reduced to a purely passive state. His monads were dynamic in a physical rather than an organic sense; they were endowed with an active force, a notion he borrowed from Wolff s "atoms of nature." Challenging the adequacy of Cartesian theory, Kant asserted in several sections of his essay that prior to extension natural bodies must possess "intension" or internal force (Secs. 2, 3, 117, and 129). What Kant called lebendige Kraft was Leibniz's vis viva, living force-symbolically mV2,where m = quantity of matter, and v = its velocity. This term stood for the measure of a body's internal force. Kant further assumed that space in nature was a continuum, and as such, was one aspect of Leibniz's "splendid law of continuity." Yet, treating primal matter in so geometrical a fashion troubled him (Sec. 114), especially since this might involve the mathematics of the infinite. For him, primal matter was metaphysical and thus could not be reduced to geometric bodies. As a metaphysical entity primal matter could exist "nowhere present in the world" (Sec. 7), a quasi-Leibnizian interpretation of monadic reality existing outside of space and time. In epistemology, a subject to which he devoted many paragraphs, Kant differed from Leibniz. Leibniz had based his epistemology on the hypothesis of the pre2Gedanken von der wahren Schdtzung der lebendigen Krafte, Wilhelm Dilthey, ed., Kant's Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1910), Vol. I, pp. 1-183. 3Isaac Newton, Opticks (4th ed., 1730; reprinted New York: Dover, 1952), p. 400.

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established harmony, which stated that no direct interaction could occur between the radically distinct mind and matter. He likened them to two synchronized clocks running independently. Kant, however, maintained that there was an influxusphysicus, or direct physical influence, on the mind (Sec. 6). In accepting this blend of a physical and metaphysical doctrine relating mind to matter, he followed precisely the position that his teacher Knutzen had advanced as early as 1735. In dynamics, which was the core of his essay, Kant preferred Newtonian ideas to those of Leibniz and the Wolffians at some critical junctures. The subject of "living forces" had been a source of serious contention between Newtonians and Wolffians since 1719, and it was this that probably prompted Knutzen to urge them as the subject of Kant's essay. For the Wolffians, following Leibniz, vis viva was the correct measure of the intensity of a given force, and its sum was conserved in a collision between bodies. Indeed, the conservation of vis viva was the unifying principle for their dynamics. The Newtonians, like the Cartesians, countered that momentum, or m Ivi (i.e., quantity of matter multiplied by uniform velocity), was the correct measure of force and that it alone was conserved. Kant's position in the continuing and sometimes heated debate4 was to accept the conservation of momentum as well as Newton's law of inertia and inverse-square law of gravitation (Secs. 10, 114, and 115). Displaying a reconciling tendency, he maintained in the first chapter of his essay that Leibniz's vis viva gave the correct measure of the intrinsic force inherent in a moving body left to its own (Secs. 17 and 19). Its conservation was a metaphysical principle. But in the second chapter of his essay Kant accepted the Cartesian position that vis viva did not give the correct measure of force for motion impressed upon a body by contact, or what he called "driven motion." The Leibnizian measure applied only in cases of "free motion." This denial of its conservation in "driven motion" impacts clashed with Leibniz's ideas, especially as articulated by the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli in his studies of the collision of elastic bodies (Secs. 23-24 and 45-47). That Kant did not have a good command of the sources on Newtonian dynamics is suggested by the writings cited in his first essay and his attempt to engage Euler, the leading scientist of the period, in correspondence. In the essay he refers to the large accumulated literature on force measurement in Acta eruditorum, the Commentarii of the St. Petersburg Academy, and some textbooks like Mme. du Chatelet's Institutions de physique (1740). But he demonstrates little acquaintance with the writings of Newton or the Memoires of the Paris and Berlin academies. Through Knutzen he later examined articles by Euler in the Berlin Memoires, and these particularly impressed him. Thus, in 1749, two years after his essay was published, Kant-then an unknown scholar of only twenty-five-sent Euler a copy and asked for comments. Euler did not reply, although he was a responsive and congenial man in most matters. It would seem that Euler took this course in part because he saw that Kant not only lacked an adequate understanding of Newtonian physics but, what was more unfor4The controversy over the conservation of vis viva had been rekindled in Europe during the 1740s. In France, Emilie du Chatelet elicited a strong Newtonian response when she reduced to nonsense J. J. Dortous de Mairan's support for the Cartesian measure of force (mv) in her book Institutions dephysique (1740). In Prussia, the dominant Wolffian position was shaken after Maupertuis and Euler, two powerful protagonists of Newtonian dynamics, arrived at the Berlin Academy. For more information on the polemic among the French, see Carolyn Iltis, "Madame du Chatelet's Metaphysics and Mechanics," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 1977, 8:29-48. For accounts of the debate in Prussia, see Polonoff, Force, Cosmos, Monads, pp. 5-65, and Jules Vuillemin, Physique et metaphysique kantiennes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), pp. 196-23 1.

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tunate, had failed to examine a recent book that resolved the vis viva controversy. The book was Jean Le Rond d'Alembert's Traite de dynamique (1743). After carefully defining the concept of force, d'Alembert had concluded that the vis viva polemic was a "dispute over words."' Writing at the same time as Kant, the Yugoslav physicist Rudjer Bo'skovic(1711-1787) would similarly refer to the controversy in his discourse De viribus vivis (1747) as a mere argument "over titles." Euler, who was very language conscious, concurred with the judgment of these two scientists. D'Alembert and subsequently Bo'skovic had proceeded to identify the momentum of a particle as Newton's force (F) acting through time, mv = Ft, and vis viva as twice Newton's force acting over space, mV2= 2Fs.6 Kant had missed this resolution by d'Alembert and had failed to arrive at it independently. Although he and Euler were never to correspond, Kant ranked Euler second only to Newton as a scientist. Kant would draw extensively upon Euler's writings in his early response to Newtonian science and would do so even more in his Critical period.7 From a mild and partial defense of Newtonian dynamics in his first essay, Kant proceeded to a staunch and competent defense in his remarkable book Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, completed in 1755.8 In this work, commonly known in English as Theory of the Heavens, he presented his nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system which holds that the planets originally evolved from primordial matter. In describing the evolution of the universe, Kant used only the gravitational force of attraction and repulsion, the latter mistakenly considered a force. Both, he stated, were "borrowed from the Natural Philosophy of Newton."9 He called the law of attraction an original and universal law of nature "which is now established beyond doubt,"10undoubtedly a dismissal of the Cartesian critics who earlier had maintained that attraction was an occult quality. Kant's nebular hypothesis supported the evolving Newtonian long-term-stability explanation of the solar system. It used only Newtonian laws and forces to account for the origin and operation of the solar system, without recourse to divine intervention, a view Laplace later worked out in detail. Kant also accepted the vacuum in nature, but like Newton he was disturbed by the concept of absolute empty space. In his theory of matter the physical monads were endowed with the force of attraction, a dynamical view similar to that of the British Newtonians on atoms, but one which Newton himself had rejected in his correspondence with the Anglican cleric and philologist Richard Bentley (1662-1742). 1 Kant required a long comparative study to accept and assimilate the Newtonian cosmology. As background for the Theory of the Heavens he appears to have read
5Jean d'Alembert, Traite de dynamique (1st ed., Paris, 1743), p. xxi. According to Newton's second law, F = ma. Since v = at, then mv = mat = Ft. According to Galileo, 2s = at2. Since V2 = a2t2 = 2a(Q2 at2) = 2as; then mV2 = 2mas and mV2 = 2Fs. 7Yehuda Elkana, "Scientific and Metaphysical Problems: Euler and Kant," in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1974, 14:277-305. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky, eds., Methodological and Historical Essays in the Natural and Social Sciences (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974). 8Although it was printed in 1755, this book was not fully published, including a general distribution, until 1791. See the discussion below and n. 16 for its publication record. Its complete title in English is The General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, or an Essay on the Constitution and Mechanical Origin of the Whole Universe, Treated According to Newtonian Principles. 9Kant, Theory of the Heavens (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 35. Kant admits that repulsion is not demonstrated as distinctly as attxaction by Newtonian science and limits its use to problems in the theory of matter. 0Ibid., pp. 24 and 35. 111. B. Cohen, ed., Isaac Newton's Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), letter III, p. 302.
6

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selections from the seven volumes of An Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present (London, 1736-1744), which examined the cosmologies of the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks and discussed Cartesian vortices.12That compilation of several original authors included the English cosmogonist William Whiston's A New Theory of the Earth (1696), in which the author antedated Kant's attempt to justify the evolution of the earth with the aid of Newtonian cosmology. Kant further consulted some of the eight bulky volumes of Arcana coelestia (London, 1749-1756) by the Swedish clairvoyant and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), as well as Swedenborg's earlier volume, Principia rerum naturalium (1734), which the author probably conceived as a counterpart to Newton's Principia mathematica (1687). Swedenborg had searched for a comprehensive physical explanation of the world based on the Cartesian vortex cosmology-a theory Kant rejected because of Newton's penetrating criticism of vortices in the Principia and because of empirical verifications of the precision of Newtonian dynamics. Indeed, Kant referred to "the infallible calculations of Newton" on the dynamics of the solar system.13It is probable, however, that he derived the rudiments of his nebular hypothesis from Swedenborg. In the Theory of the Heavens Kant went beyond Newton in one important way: he extended the application of the Newtonian law of attraction, and with it Newtonian mechanics, to the entire universe. Newton had restricted himself to the mechanics of the earth and solar system. But subsequently the British astronomer Thomas Wright (1711-1786) had treated the mechanics of galactic systems in his book An Original Theory of an Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). Wright had conjectured that vague central forces, which he identified as gravities, produced order in the multiplicity of galaxies. These central forces operated independently within the defined boundaries of each galaxy but were coordinated by a Divine agent or fountain at the center of Creation. An abstract of Wright's book in the Hamburg journal Freie Urteile in 1751 aroused Kant's interest in the operation of gravity beyond the solar system, but it failed to persuade him of the explanation. He quickly discarded Wright's disjoint, separate galactic gravities and argued for the more general explanation of the singular operation of gravity throughout the universe. The concept of structured galaxies, which was novel in the early eighteenth century, remained important in Kant's thought, however, and here again the Newtonian influence was strong. The Prussian philosopher derived his conception of galaxies from two prominent Newtonians, the British Astronomer Royal James Bradley (1693-1762) and the French physicist Pierre Maupertuis (1698-1759), who was then the president of the Berlin Academy. From his careful observation and accurate measurement of the deviations of Gamma Draconis and other stars in 1727, Bradley had verified that some of the fixed stars appeared to move;14 Maupertuis suggested to Kant the existence of structured galaxies in his book Discours sur le figure des astres (1732), a text which examined huge distant "stars" with rotatory motion and elliptical forms. Kant believed that these were not single stars but star systems operating according to Newtonian principles.15 Unfortunately, the Theory of the Heavens did not become available in 1755. Its publisher, Johann Petersen, went bankrupt shortly before its release, and his stock
12Kant, Theory of the Heavens, p. 27. l3Ibid., p. 87. 14Ibid., p. 31. s5Ibid.,pp. 62-63.

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was impounded. Thus, the book, which was dedicated to Frederick II, did not reach the growing reading public for some time. Kant believed that it was important and presented a summary of it in 1763, but it was not published until 1791 and then only in an abbreviated version.'6 Scientific speculation continued to occupy a prominent place in Kant's work during the late 1750s and the early 1760s. Some of his research fell outside the focus of Newtonian science; some of it was contrary to Newtonian ideas. His interests included geology, the nature of fire, the theory of winds, and the retardation of the earth's rotation by tidal friction. Two major topics that he addressed now were the theories of matter and of optics, but his work suffered because he never acquired a firm grasp of either. He could not incorporate Newton's atomism, with its passive, particulate view of the universe, into his theory of matter; nor could he accept a purely geometric and hence infinitely divisible account of matter. The dynamical theory of matter, briefly treated in his first published essay, appeared in a more detailed version in his treatise Monadologia physica (1756). Following Leibniz and Wolff, he asserted that all material bodies are composed of monads. His monads were simple, physical substances without parts-in essence, point-atoms. These point-atoms and their composites existed in space, which was divisible ad infinitum a view congruent with a spatial continuum. Kant's mature view of matter, which distinguished between the appearance of a material object in space and the reality behind appearances, was developing. Even at this stage his theory of matter was similar to, but independent of, that of Bo'skovic.In his Theoriaphilosophiae naturalis (1758), Bo'skovic depicted the "elements" of matter as simple indivisible points possessed of inertia. Extended matter became the dynamic configuration of a finite number of point-centers of interaction. In optics Kant vacillated between the corpuscular theory of Newton and the wave theory of Euler. More often than not, however, he supported Euler.'7 In 1762 Kant began to shift his intellectual emphasis away from scientific speculation. Rousseau's newly published Emile had an immediate and profound impact. Kant wrote:
By inclination I am an inquirer. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge, the unrest which goes with the desire to progress in it, and satisfaction at every advance in it. There was a time when I believed this constituted the honor of humanity, and I despised the people, who know nothing. Rousseau corrected me in this. This blinding prejudice disappeared. I learned to honor man.'8
16Norwas it published prominently. Kant's 14-page summary was the seventh section of Chapter 2 of his treatise Der einzig mogliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (1763, see Kant's Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 11(1912), pp. 137-15 1). The abbreviated version appeared as an appendix to a dissertation by another Konigsberg professor, Johann Friedrich Gensichen (1759-1809), who was also one of Kant's dinner companions. A letter of Apr. 19, 1791, from Kant to Gensichen authorizing him to publish the abbreviated version is contained in Kant's Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. XI (1922), letter 466, pp. 252-253. In the meantime, the Alsatian physicist Johann Lambert (1728-1777) had independently developed a nebular hypothesis in his Cosmologische Briefe (1761). Furthermore, it is unlikely that the 1763 summary or the appendix to Gensichen's dissertation was noticed by the French astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827), who advanced a different version of the nebular hypothesis in his Systeme du monde (1796). Such was the genesis of what today is called the Kant-Laplace theory. 17ErichAdickes, Kant als Naturforscher (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1924), Vol. I, pp. 42-43, 144. 18Kant's Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. XX (1942), p. 44: Ich bin selbst aus Neigung ein Forscher. Ich fuihleden ganzen Durst nach Erkentnis u. die begierige Unruhe darin weiter zu kommen oder auch die Zufriedenheit ben jedem Erwerb. Es war eine Zeit da ich glaubte dieses allein konnte die Ehre der Menschheit machen u. ich verachtete den Pobel der von nichts weis. Rousseau hat mich zurecht gebracht. Dieser verblendende Borzug verschwindet, ich lerne die Menschen ehren. . .

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Scientific interests yielded to urgent moral concerns; Rousseau, the philosopher of the microcosm, replaced Newton, the philosopher of the macrocosm, at the center of his studies. Yet this shift did not mean an end to Newtonian influence, as his work in methodology, mathematics, and the nature of space and time demonstrates.
METHODOLOGY AND MATHEMATICS

Besides the scientific interests already noted, methodology and the foundations of mathematics were important concerns for Kant during the pre-Critical period, a time when his methodology was undergoing great change. He would shift in the 1760s from a moderate rationalism falling within Wolffian confines to the empirical Newtonian-Lockean tradition. The young Kant was sufficiently critical to express contempt in his first published essay for those who accepted dogmatic authority. At this early stage he embraced logic or the axiomatic method of mathematics with deductive reason as his method. Following Leibniz and Wolff, he professed a belief in the regulative principle of the unity of nature. Accordingly, it was the goal of theoretical inquiry in the phenomenal realm to combine empirical, heterogeneous laws of nature under a general principle. Newton's law of attraction, Maupertuis' principle of least action, and Linnaeus' taxonomy were examples. Successful generalizing, he thought, led to a feeling of pleasure-an aesthetic characteristic of theoretical enquiry. Through cognizing, the seeker might attain understanding or apperception, a term he borrowed directly from Leibniz. From Leibniz, Wolff, and Swedenborg he envisioned two realms for investigation, the phenomenal and the metaphysical. The transition in Kant's methodology occurred gradually. As early as the 1750s he had begun to question the ability of cognitive reason to solve all problems. Equally with rationalism, the opposing tendency of German Pietism also influenced Kant from the start of his career. Pietism, which stressed individualism and the noncognitive way of reaching the truth, provided one source to challenge the omnicompetency of reason. Moreover, he was drawn to the movement among some Wolffians to escape Wolff s "one faculty theory" of knowledge, that is, analysis. His escape was assisted by another Prussian philosopher, Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762), whom Kant regarded as an "excellent analyst" and a "giant among metaphysicists." Baumgarten had established aesthetics-taste based on sense perception-as a cognitive discipline separate from logic.19 Kant used Baumgarten's book Metaphysica (1739) as a text in his lectures and read his Aesthetica (1750). He also appealed to the work of Baumgarten's student Georg Friedrich Meier (1718-1777), who attributed to the aesthetic experience a perfection of its own that was separate from rational knowledge. Kant used Meier's Vernunftlehre (1752) as a textbook after 1756 when teaching logic. By the mid-1750s, then, Kant had begun to move away from Wolffian rationalism. In his Nova dilucidatio (1755), for example, he spoke highly of the Leipzig professor Christian August Crusius (1715-1775), who systematically opposed Wolff s intellec-

The influence of Rousseau upon Kant is briefly described in Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1969), pp. 489 if.; Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947); and Paul Arthur Schilpp, Kant's Pre-Critical Ethics (2nd ed., Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1960), pp. 20-40, 46-52. 19ErnstCassirer, The Philosophy of Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 338-339.

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tual philosophy, especially his efforts to model philosophy after mathematics. Another possible early source for Kant's challenge of Wolff s rationalism was Hume's skepticism. Sulzer's translation of Hume's Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding into German in 1755 provided an accessible source in his native tongue. And, to be sure, Kant early knew of Hume, as he related in a famous passage in his Prologomena(1783): ". . . die Errinerung des David Hume war eben dasjenige, was mir vor vielen Jahren zuerst den dogmatische Schlummer unterbrach und meinen Untersuchungen im Felde der spekulativen Philosophie eine ganz andre Richtung gab."20But recent scholarship suggests that the "first spark of light" from Hume did not illuminate Kant's thoughts until after 1768 and possibly not until after he read James Beattie's Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, an attack on Hume's Treatise which was translated into German in 1772.21 During the 1760s Kant expressed doubt that reality could be comprehended solely by cognitive reason. In 1763 the Berlin Academy held a prize contest on the question of the degree of certainty of metaphysical truths and the appropriate basis for them. Kant submitted an essay titled "Untersuchung uber die Deutlichkeit der Grundsatze der naturliche Theologie und Moral," now commonly known as the Prize Essay because it won the second place award, the Accessit. The essay rejected the existing logic of mathematical reasoning as a basis for metaphysics and placed in its stead the critical empirical methods that Newton introduced into the natural sciences with the help of geometry.22 More than the metaphysical views of Baumgarten and Crusius were now at stake:23the intense scientific debate between the Newtonians and the Wolffians at the Berlin Academy in the mid-1760s strongly influenced Kant. In those debates Euler-with backing from Lambert-forcefully and persuasively defended the Newtonian cosmology and methodology.24 After the close of the Seven Years' War, Kant began to correspond regularly with Lambert, who sought to mediate between Wolff and Locke with the aid of Leibniz.25 He came to regard Lambert highly, read his Neues Organon (1764), and subsequently helped to have published his Anlage zur Architectonic (1771), which in its discussion of the axiomatic method heralded the critical period in philosophy.26 In the late 1760s Kant's published writings advocated applying the methodology of Newtonian science to study the phenomenal world. This followed his intense reading of Plato's view of the Good and the dialectic and Leibniz's Nouveaux essais (1708; published in 1765). These writings brought out the inadequacy of the dogmatic rationalism of the Wolffians. His personal transition from a moderate rationalism to empiricism can be traced in the Traume eines Geistersehers (1766), where he broke
20Kant's Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV (1911), p. 260. 21See Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 1923), pp. xxviii-xxix and Robert P. Wolff, "Kant's Debt to Hume via Beattie," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1960, 21:117-123. 221mmanuelKant, "Enquiry Concerning the Clarity of the Principles of Natural Theology and Ethics," in G. B. Kerferd and D. E. Walford, trans., Kant: Selected Pre-Critical Writingsand Correspondence with Beck (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), p. 17. For a succinct account of Newton's methodology, see Opticks, query 31, esp. pp. 404-406. 23Polonoff, Force, Cosmos, Monads, pp. 181-183. 24Beck, Early German Philosophy, p. 405. 25See Arnulf Zweig, ed., Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759-99 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 43-54, 58-67. 26Kant'sdrafted dedication of the Critique of Pure Reason to Lambert testifies further to his admiration for Lambert. This was not included in the final published form, since Lambert died in 1777, four years before publication of the Critique. See Stanley L. Jaki, "Lambert: Self-Taught Physicist," Physics Today, Sept. 1977:26.

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with Swedenborg's mysticism,27and his inaugural dissertation, "De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis" (1770), where he praised the "truly perspicacious Euler" for recognizing that different types of explanations are required to account for the physical and metaphysical realms.28Like Euler, he now advocated using the critical empiricism of Newton and Locke to study the physical world. Critical empiricism had several components. It followed the hypothetico-deductive method for investigating the physical world, which Kant described as a world of quantity, a basic notion established during the scientific revolution. It required mechanical (cause-effect) explanations in natural science, and anchored scientific theories in experience.29Kant now subscribed to the Lockean notion that all knowledge of nature is based on perception. Throughout his pre-Critical period, as afterwards, Kant recognized that mathematics was essential to scientific research, a view the Cartesians, Newtonians, and Wolffians shared. But what areas of mathematics did he stress? While leading continental mathematicians developed the calculus, he emphasized the centrality of geometry in the sciences. In his Theory of the Heavens he had admired the relations between geometrical forms and figures and physical phenomena. For him, geometry was the "pure part of natural science"; it was, as he stated in 1770, "the most faithful interpreter of all phenomena."30Here he followed the tradition of the British Newtonians, who observed that Newton had employed the geometrical method of proof in the Principia.31 Like them, he failed to grasp the true and novel character of Newton's manner of proof, which was to establish geometrical conditions and then at once to introduce a carefully conceived limiting process. Therein, in distinction to the ancient Greeks, Newton based his proofs on a theory of limits (an early stage of the calculus). Besides an admiration for the formal structure of Newton's Principia, Kant was drawn to the axiomatic method of Euclidean geometry because he believed that geometrical propositions were meaningful, conveying information about the world of experience and carrying knowable truth values in themselves. As he explained in the 1763 Prize Essay and later detailed in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), all propositions admitted into geometrical proofs must apply to the objects of actual or highly probable experience. Thus geometrical propositions could neither apply to all possible worlds beyond the given world of experience nor could they be reduced to the truth of logic, as Leibniz had suggested in the Theodicy (Prop. 351). They were synthetic, with their construction depending upon individual intuitions, that is, fundamental sense impressions.32 By working through chains of inferences, geome27lmmanuel Kant, Dreams of a Spirit Seer and Other Related Writings, trans. John Manolesco (New York: Vantage Press, 1969), pp. 7-16. For a psychoanalytic treatment of Kant's changing views on methodology and metaphysics see Lewis S. Feuer, "Lawless Sensations and Categorical Defenses: The Unconscious Sources of Kant's Philosophy" in C. Hanley and M. Lazerowitz, eds., Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (New York: International Universities Press, 1970), pp. 111-117. 28Immanuel Kant, Kant's Inaugural Dissertation and Writings on Space, trans. John Handyside (Chicago: Open Court, 1919), p. 77. Kant hastily wrote the essay "De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis" (The Forms and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible Worlds) to celebrate the occasion of his becoming a full professor of metaphysics and logic at Konigsberg. The original Latin version is contained in Kant's Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II, pp. 385-420. In English this essay is generally referred to as the Inaugural Dissertation. 29Ibid., pp. 65, 71. 3OIbid.,p. 62. 3'Kant, "Enquiry Concerning the Clarity of the Principles of Natural Theology and Ethics," Kerferd and Walford, trans., Selected Pre-Critical Writings, p. 55. 32Ibid., pp. 6-18 and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), B12-B15, A155/B194, A220/B268, A713/B741, and A718/B746-A724/B752.

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ters could establish indispensable scientific truths. Their synthetic a priori proofs provided authoritative knowledge about objective reality. Kant contrasted these geometrical proofs with the analytical reasoning of philosophy and its subfield of metaphysics, whose conclusions only attained a problematic and hypothetical status. Moreover, he observed in 1763 that metaphysics had not yet entered on the sure path of science. Therein he distinguished between geometrical and metaphysical reasoning in an essentially modern way.33 In his mature scientific outlook Kant assumed that there was only one consistent geometry, Euclidean, that could describe the actual physical universe.34This was not the case early in his career. In reaching this conclusion he had at one time admitted the possibility of other (non-Euclidean) geometries that applied to all possible kinds of space. At first, he regarded these other geometries to be based primarily on exercises in logic and called for work on them in his initial essay, "Thoughts on the True Estimate of Living Forces."35Later, when he saw that the foundations of nonEuclidean geometries rested not only on logic but also on constructions in space, his ideas changed. His belief in the centrality of constructions in geometry evolved from his Monadologia physica (1752) (Prop. III) through his 1763 Prize Essay and his correspondence with Lambert.36By the 1770s Kant indicated that a non-Euclidean geometry could not be devised whose truths apply to the phenomenal world, in part because he thought that no universal standard of measure existed in such geometries.37Pure measurability based on the iteration of standard units was, he believed, crucial to Newtonian science.38 In the Critique of Pure Reason he asserted that consistent non-Euclidean geometries might be invented for imagined space, but again disavowed that they could apply to real space.39 It is somewhat ironic that Kant, who established closure for pure reason, failed to understand that the same principle was required in geometry. Closure means that a system or procedure operates only for a given range of problems. In this instance, Euclidean geometry applies to local space, while non-Euclidean geometries apply to large, curved space. It remained for nineteenth-century mathematicians (Gauss, Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann) to demonstrate that consistent non-Euclidean geometries do exist,40and for Einstein's general theory of relativity to show that they apply to the physical universe.

In Smith's notation letter A refers to the first edition of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Riga: J. F. Hatknoch, 1781). Letter B refers to the extensively revised second edition (1787), which first fully alerted the Wolffians to the danger posed by Kant to their philosophical primacy in Germany. Indeed, Kant's philosophy quickly began to supersede theirs after 1787. 33Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), p. 121, and Polonoff, Force, Cosmos, Monads, pp. 86-88. Heidegger's book, in German Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tuibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1962), is based on lectures that he gave in winter semester, 1935-1936, at Freiburg. 34By the 1780s Kant believed that there could not be any non-Euclidean geometries that describe the actual world because of what he viewed as their counterintuitability and their nonconstructibility. This paragraph and the section below on space and time present some of his reasons leading to this position. See also Gordon G. Brittan, Jr., Kant's Theory of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 68-89. 35Kant's Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I, Sec. 10, p. 24. 36Zweig, ed., Kant's Philosophical Correspondence, 1759-99, p. 53. 37Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, Kerferd and Walford, trans., Selected Pre-Critical Writings, p. 71. 38Ibid., p. 73, and Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), p. 44. 39Critiqueof Pure Reason, A60/1B85, B268, A713/1B714. 40The German mathematician Carl F. Gauss (1777-1855) first coined the term "non-Euclidean" after 1813. By the late 19th century another German mathematician, Felix Klein (1849-1925), proved that in a

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During the Enlightenment the calculus gained ascendancy over geometry in the field of mathematics. Kant, who had studied the calculus under Knutzen, was aware of its rapid progress. Although he was greatly impressed by Euler's ability to bring into unity large parts of experience by means of the calculus, he lacked the sophisticated mathematical training and mathematical equipment required to produce comparable studies. Euler combined Newton's method of fluxions and Leibniz's differential calculus into mathematical analysis, which he extensively developed.41Kant did not contribute to this area of Newton's ideas. Like most of the British Newtonians, Kant did not follow in the mathematical footsteps of Newton. His contributions to mathematics were minor, sometimes wrong, and were restricted mainly to the foundations -of Euclidean geometrical reasoning and to the nature of space.
SPACE AND TIME

The growth of Kant's thought on space and, to a lesser extent, on time was exceedingly complex and embedded in his responses to Leibnizian and Newtonian science.42 Apparently his reading of the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, which was republished in 1768, moved Kant to resolve the controversy between the Newtonians and Leibniz-Wolffians regarding the nature of each. In the Correspondence Clarke had defended Newton's position that time and space are objective and absolute. This meant that they were ontologically primitive realities that existed prior to extended objects and events. Leibniz had disagreed: he asserted that time and space were subjective and relative. They were the order of actual and possible relations between extended objects or events. They were thus ontologically derivative. For Leibniz they were merely well-founded appearances (phenomena benefundatum). Where Newtonian dynamics and Euclidean space were accepted, as in Western Europe, Leibniz's theory had little chance of success. During his pre-Critical period Kant's theory of space changed substantially and was not always consistent. At the start of his career he sometimes supported Leibniz's relative space but generally came to accept Newton's absolute space, as described in the General Scholium of the Principia. Kant traced the origin of his absolute theory to an article by Euler in the Berlin Academy Memoires for 1748 titled "Reflexions sur l'espace et le temps."43 During the 1750s and 1760s the writings of Crusius and Lambert on space reinforced this theory in Kant's mind. As late as his paper "Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden Raum" (1768), which praised the genius of Leibniz, he held the Newtonian position. He wrote: "absolute space has a reality of its own, independent of the existence of all matter, and indeed as the first ground of the possibility of the compositeness of matter."44

sufficiently small domain, classical or Euclidean geometry is basically a limiting case of hyperbolic geometry. In hyperbolic geometry the sum of the angles in a triangle is less than 180'. 41 Newton's fluxion is essentially the modern derivative taken with respect to time: xc= dxldt. Kant kept abreast of recent developments in mathematics, which was a subject he occasionally taught. When the Russian armies occupied East Prussia during the Seven Years' War, for example, he taught the Russian officers mathematics. The Russian occupation lasted from the beginning of 1758 to August 1762. 42GerdBuchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), pp. 574-615, and Patrick S. Madigan, "Time in Locke and Kant," Kant Studien, 1976, 67:20-51. 43Arnold Koslow, ed., The Changeless Order: The Physics of Space, Time and Motion (New York: Braziller, 1967), pp. 115-125, and C. B. Garnett, Jr., The Kantian Philosophy of Space (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939). 44Kant, "On the First Ground of the Distinction of Regions in Space," Inaugural Dissertation and Writings on Space, trans. Handyside, p. 20.

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Two years later Kant changed his mind. He erected a new theory of space in his Inaugural Dissertation (1770). This paper, which falls at the threshold of his Critical period, provides vital clues to understanding the development of Kant's doctrine of space and time-both of which he now defined as "pure intuitions" or "absolutely primary, formal principles of the sensible world."45 As he explained later in his Critique of Pure Reason, there are two fundamental and complementary components that are necessary for gaining a knowledge of experience.46They are intuitions, which are singular, and concepts, which are more general. In the Critique he also explicitly distinguished between pure and empirical intuitions. Pure intuitions related to the "form" of a phenomenon, and empirical intuitions to its matter, such as color and temperature. Both types were basic sense impressions. Since intuitions and concepts were complementary, the pure intuitions of space and time could no longer be understood discursively in terms of concepts. To form his new theory of space, Kant, in the Inaugural Dissertation, selectively synthesized elements from Newton's and Leibniz's opposing theories of space and rejected other elements from each. He described space as "subjective and ideal" and likened it to a schema "issuing by a constant law from the nature of the mind, for the coordinating of all outer sensa whatsoever."47Nevertheless, he also maintained that the concept of absolute space was useful, because it provided "the foundation of all truth in outer sensibility."48Here was the core of Kant's novel idea on space: it was subjective, as Leibniz and Wolff held, and yet absolute, as Newton held. His subjective-absolute theory contradicted the Newtonian belief that space was objective and ontologically real and was an infinite, self-subsistent receptacle for all possible phenomena. Kant labeled this Newtonian hypothesis, which prevailed among geometers, "an empty figment of reason, since it imagines an infinity of real relations without any things which are so related."49 Kant proved more critical of Leibniz's relational theory of space, which he believed most German natural philosophers still accepted,50 thus indicating a continuing dominance of the Wolffian philosophy. Although they had modified Leibniz's theory of space, Wolff and his disciples still maintained that space was the order of actual and possible relations between all existent things, and that it would vanish if these things were annihilated. Kant strongly disagreed because the relational theory controverted his beliefs that Euclidean geometry provided a uniquely correct description of space and that its synthetic a priori proofs provided authoritative knowledge about objective reality. If all properties of space depended upon external relations through experience, as Leibniz and the Wolffians held, then geometry would be no more than inductive generalizations of our experience of the world. Euclidean geometry would be reduced from its synthetic a priori character, which established the highest possible certainty in the sciences, to the rank of an empirical science. If this were so, some manner of arbitrary convention would replace its precision. Kant rejected such thought. In the Inaugural Dissertation Kant also treated the epistemological question of how we come to acquire our knowledge of time. In so doing, he refined his doctrine
45lnaugural Dissertation, in ibid., pp. 59, 62. 46Critique of Pure Reason, A50/B74, A271/B32, and A320/B376. See also C. D. Broad, Kant: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), ed. by C. Lewy, pp. 17-57. 47Kant, Inaugural Dissertation, pp. 61-62. 48Ibid., p. 62.
49Ibid.

5OIbid.

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of time, which he considered to be the locus where ideas and events occurred. He contended that two concepts were crucial to understanding time-succession and simultaneity. Since neither absolute nor relative time embraced both concepts in a consistent manner, he rejected them. For the Newtonians absolute time was a continuous real flux (or substance) that was independent of any existing thing. Kant called this view a "commentum absurdissimum,"51because it suggested a contradiction-namely, that time was a substance within the realm of existence and yet could be found without any material entity. He denied that there was such empty, absolute time. Time was, he agreed, independent of all existing material things and thus was not a substance but a universal forms His grasp of time, which he depicted as being "continuous," rested partly on the arithmetical concept of succession. In turn, successive changes in the universe derived from the metaphysical law of continuity. Temporal changes, however, did not depend upon the internal constructs of the mind, but vice versa. Hence, time was not relative, as Leibniz held. It was not merely a mathematical function abstracted from the dynamic sequence of internal states. Kant discarded Leibniz's relational definition because it was tautological and neglected simultaneity, an important consequence of temporality. Time was, therefore, neither Newton's substance nor Leibniz's function; it was rather a pure intuition that was self-subsistent and antecedent to things-in-themselves.52 The Inaugural Dissertation marked a major development in Kant's scientific thought during the pre-Critical period. Previously he had adopted some Newtonian ideas as well as others from Leibniz and the Wolffians and had elaborated them. In the Inaugural Dissertation he digested the Newtonian and Leibnizian theories of space and time, rejected both, and transcended them with his presentation of space and time as pure intuitions-an analysis he retained in his Critique of Pure Reason. 53
CONCLUSION

In his pre-Critical period Kant was an admirer of Newton. Much of the scientific speculation that he engaged in stemmed from issues raised in Newton's Principia. He did not, however, accept the complex and changing Newtonian science without qualifications. Instead, he adopted a scientific heterodoxy that arose from a distinctive Germanic scientific outlook. That is to say, his scientific heterodoxy was indebted to selected Leibnizian and Wolffian ideas as well as the thought of leading members of the Berlin Academy, particularly Euler. Like Euler, he accepted and extended Newtonian mechanics even while embracing Leibniz's concept of vis viva. In the theory of matter he rejected Newton's atomism and developed a dynamic theory of primal substance similar to Bo'skovic'spoint atomism. In optics he subscribed to Euler's wave theory of light rather than to Newton's corpuscular theory. In methodology he shifted during the 1760s from a moderate rationalism, somewhat in the Wolffian mode, to the Newtonian-Lockean critical empiricism. As a consequence of his evolving and, at times, seemingly inconsistent views of the nature of space and time, Kant moved from a general acceptance of Newton's absolute theory and a rejection of Leibniz's relative one to a powerful departure from both with his conception of space and time as "pure intuitions," a movement that brought him to
5lIbid., p. 57. Handyside translates this phrase as a "most egregious fiction." 52Ibid., pp. 55-59. 53Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 65-92, and esp. the "Amphibolies," pp. 285-286.

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the verge of his Critical period.54Thus, in the Kantian scientific heterodoxy, Newtonian mechanics and methodology fared well, while the Newtonian theories of matter, of light, and of space and time encountered some difficulties. Today Kant is only beginning to be recognized as one of the first generation of scholars competently examining and promoting Newtonian ideas in Prussia. But this was an essential element of his early studies, as his first published essay, the nine of his eleven treatises written from 1755 to 1759 on physics, and his Inaugural Dissertation testify. His close scrutiny of Newtonian and Leibniz-Wolffian science was a crucial preparatory step toward the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which attempted to harmonize the world of a modified Newtonian science with the world of religious faith and moral experience. Intellectual and geographical circumstances largely account for our knowing little of his work in this important field. The delay in the publication of the Theory of the Heavens, as well as the very nature of Kant's research-primarily speculative and lacking in detailed experiment or sophisticated mathematical technique-lessened its early impact on the scientific community. His scientific contributions did not compare with those of Maupertuis and Euler, who advanced Newtonian dynamics in Berlin; and Konigsberg was far removed not only from Berlin but also from Halle, the second of the two chief centers of scientific and scholarly research in Prussia during the mid-eighteenth century. Even so, within a small learned circle that grew larger in the 1760s through correspondence and publications, Kant was a powerful native voice disseminating, criticizing, and selectively elaborating Newtonian science at the initial stage of its influence in Prussia.

54 The Critique of Pure Reason was a therapeutic work. To cure the maladies arising from the antinomies of pure reason and the skepticism of Hume, it set pure reason for the first time within the boundaries of its nature and its inner unity. It also attempted to establish metaphysics as a science, so as to move its proofs to a higher level of certainty that was closer to those of geometry. It thereby attempted to extend the "Copernican revolution" of the exact sciences to metaphysics. These aspects of the Critique, as well as its persistent motif of time treated as a pure intuition, show that the evolution of Kant's thought in the sciences and their methodology was central to his achieving his mature "critical" position.