The Elegant Magister 137Kant's essay represented a more radical departure from traditional
German philosophy, and that may have played a role as well. Mendelssohn
had answered the question affirmatively in a traditional Wolffian (or rather
Baumgartian) fashion. Kant followed Newton. Indeed, he explicitly claimed
that his method was that of Newton, and he argued that mathematical cer¬
tainty was different from philosophical certainty. Though the one was not
greater than the other, the methods were quite dissimilar. While mathe¬
matics could follow the synthetic method, metaphysics had to follow the
analytical method. Stipulative definitions, which form the basis of math¬
ematical construction, have no place in philosophy. Philosophy must pro¬
ceed analytically. Construction and intuition are unavailable here. The
metaphysician must take the concepts as they are given in experience, and
analyze them. Nevertheless, there are examples of certain knowledge in
metaphysics. Not surprisingly, they turn out to be his own arguments as
given in the New Elucidation. More surprisingly, perhaps, Kant is at the
same time convinced that much less has been achieved in the metaphysics
of morals than in the rest of metaphysics. Indeed, the title of the last sec¬
tion of this work expresses his belief that "The Primary Grounds of Morals
Are, in Their Present State, Not Yet Capable of All Requisite Evidence."
This formulation stands in stark contrast to the penultimate section, which
was meant to establish that "The Primary Grounds of Natural Theology
Are Capable of the Greatest Philosophical Evidence." Kant concludes in
the final section of this essay
that, although it must be possible to attain the highest degree of philosophical evidence
in the fundamental principles of morality, nonetheless the ultimate fundamental con¬
cepts of obligation must first be defined with more certainty. In this respect the task is
greater in practical than in speculative philosophy, since it is still to be settled whether
it is simply the cognitive faculty or whether it is feeling (the primary inner ground of
the appetitive faculty) which decides the basic principles of practical philosophy.^182
The reason for this claim seems to be the lack of clarity about the. formal
principles of morality. Kant argued that while we know that the principles
of natural theology are principles of reason, we do not know this of the moral
principles. He claimed that philosophers had only realized recently that
the faculty of truth is cognition, whereas the moral faculty is "feeling" or
"sensing." What is good is disclosed by "feeling." He claimed that it was
important not to mix up the two. His view tended toward the thesis that
in morality, feelings are basic, and that the understanding can only have the
task of clarifying moral concepts by showing how they arise from "simple