The Elegant Magister 141must have all the characteristics commonly ascribed to God. Therefore,
God necessarily exists. This a priori step in Kant's argument is followed
by a step a posteriori, which was intended to establish the necessity of an
absolutely necessary being. He argued that matter itself contains the prin¬
ciples that give rise to an ordered universe, and this, he thought, leads us
to the concept of God as a Supreme Being, which "embraces within itself
everything which can be thought by man."^201 God includes all that is pos¬
sible or real. In other words, Kant offered an ingenious argument that com¬
bined a sort of ontological argument with a "purified" physico-theological
argument.
This work showed Kant at the height of speculative power, but in many
ways it was a throwback to the fifties as well. It was influenced by the Essai
de Cosmologie and the Examen philosophique (1758) of Maupertuis. It also
shows effects of Euler. In the main, it consisted of criticisms of Wolff and
Crusius, and it presented important modifications of Baumgarten's meta¬
physics. Kant also spoke highly of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's Abhand¬
lungen von den vornehmsten Wahrheiten der christlichen Religion (1754) and
of Derham, who had already played a role in his General History. Vorlän¬
der is not altogether wrong to view The Only Possible Argument as the last
work of Kant's unaturphilosophische" period. Even if one may doubt
whether there was such a "period" in Kant's life, it surely enough rep¬
resents the continued pursuit of old concerns more than the beginning of
something new.
Given this explicit critique of Crusius, Magister Weymann could not fail
to respond to The Only Possible Argument, and he did so — quickly. On Jan¬
uary 14, 1764 he published "Reservations Concerning The Only Possible
Argument of Magister Kant in Support of a Demonstration of the Exis¬
tence of God." He accuses Kant of not having understood Crusius, and
of not being able to provide arguments against atheism. As an example of
Weymann's immodesty, the following two passages will perhaps suffice:
You talk somewhat disparagingly of the logical smelter in which concepts are purified.
Every philosopher must experience this heat in his youth. This is why so few thorough
thinkers can be found within the world of philosophy. For most of them are kept away
by the fear of this smelter, and to be able to call themselves philosophers still, they
cover philosophy with the mask of elegance {Galanterie).^202
Furthermore,
At the same time you defend the case of the Idealists, for they also place the world in
a "somewhere" (Irgendwo), but only in a thought somewhere, just as we ascribe to the
garden the same shape that we see in an optical box.^203