The Elegant Magister 123a rejoinder, which appeared just a week later.^104 This led to some commo¬
tion. Kant chose to remain silent. In a letter to Lindner of October 28 he
stated his reasons:
A meteor has recently made its appearance above the academic horizon here. Magister
Weymann has sought in a rather disorderly and unintelligibly written dissertation
against optimism to make a solemn debut on this stage which has just as many clowns
as Helferding's theater. His well-known immodesty made me decline his invitation to
act as a respondent. But in the program of my lectures which I distributed the day af¬
ter his dissertation appeared and that Mr. Berens will bring to you together with the one
or other little piece, I briefly defended optimism against Crusius without thinking of
Weymann. Nevertheless, his gall was raised. The following Sunday he published a
pamphlet against the presumed attack - full of immodesty, distortions, etc.
The judgment of the public and the obvious impropriety to get involved in ex¬
changing blows by fist with a Cyclops, not to mention the rescue of a pamphlet that
may already be forgotten when its defense appears, obliged me to answer in the most
proper manner: by silence.^103
Perhaps Weymann deserved the silent treatment, but he was hardly wrong
in thinking that Kant, in attacking Crusius, was also dismissing his disser¬
tation as unworthy of even a thought or a mention. One thing is certain —
since Weymann's dissertation represented for the most part a summary of
Crusius, and since it was clear to anyone that he was a follower of Crusius,
everyone in Königsberg would have understood Kant's pamphlet to be an
attack on the new Magister.
There was not much love lost between Weymann and Kant. They were
competing for the same students, and Weymann was more successful than
Kant. Andrej Bolotov (1738-1833), who attended Weymann's lectures dur¬
ing this period, reported that Weymann secretly tried to enlist students of
other professors and that the others, "all" Wolffians, according to Bolotov,
were opposed to him and made his life difficult. The Pietist Weymann had
great influence on the students, with the result that
many of his students distanced themselves from their former teachers and, following
the Magister Weymann, now already equipped with better rules, thoughts and proofs,
became genuine opponents of those professors and were no longer to be defeated in
ordinary dispute.^106
Moreover, the philosophy that Weymann preached, namely that of Cru¬
sius, had the added benefit of "transforming any person who came close
to it, even if he did not wish to, almost automatically into a Christian."^107
Bolotov also "personally laid eyes on the great, or more bluntly put, the
muddle-headed Kant," dismissing his "Wolffism" just as he had that of all