The Elegant Magister 103the same as that which others call impenetrability. If the former force is
denied, there cannot be a place for the latter."^12 While Kant's middle sys¬
tem shares certain features with Boscovich's doctrine, it is perhaps more
indebted to Baumgarten, for whom impenetrability was also the basic char¬
acter of physical monads. Kant probably was encouraged in this view by
Euler, who in his Recherches sur l'origin des forces of 1752 had also argued
that impenetrability was one of the basic characteristics of matter.^13 Char¬
acteristically, however, he did not accept - at least at this time - Euler's ar¬
guments for absolute space, but continued to hold onto the Leibnizian view.
While Kant wanted his system to be identified neither with physical in¬
flux nor with universal harmony, it generally seems to have been viewed as
either the one or the other. The Pietists would have been very worried about
its similarities to preestablished harmony, but it was not just the Pietists with
whom Kant had to contend. The traditional Wolffians were opposed to
his attempt to mediate between the theory of physical influx and the more
Leibnizian theory of Baumgarten. Flottwell wrote on April 20, 1756:
The young men are hopping like woodpeckers around us older ones. They are pursu¬
ing us with envy, with derision, and with new thoughts; and God knows that, just as it
goes with jurisprudence in Prussia, so especially philosophy is made into a waxen nose.
A young Magister has already proven that there is a simplex compositum (a simple com¬
plex), which has no parts, however. Therefore simplex and Spiritus must be in spatio and
loco. Mr. Crusius' philosophical new births make just as much noise as Klopstock does
in poetry and rhetoric. Anyone who has neither time nor year for investigating such
dallying (Tändeley) is called an ignoramus, and it still is true: this is the best world.^14
So much for Kant's efforts at showing that infinite divisibility of space was
not opposed to simple physical monads: it represented mere dallying for the
older Wolffians.
The feelings of Hamann and other younger intellectuals in Königsberg
were more ambivalent. Thus Hamann, in responding to Lindner, said that
he had not found the dissertation as enjoyable as he had expected, and he
also tried to convince Lindner that Kant's view, according to which monads
have elastic, repulsive and attractive forces, was "more natural" than the
view that they are individuated by representations. He reported: "I, for my
part, have often asked myself when confronted with Kant's bright ideas
{Einfälle): why hasn't anyone thought about the matter in this way before?
It seems so easy to accept his view. Perhaps the continuation will bring bet¬
ter materials, and I am curious to read them." Hamann was more interested
in the promise of what was to come than in what Kant had delivered. He
expected Kant "to abstract more purely about the concept of space than