176 Kant: A Biographythrough proofs. Therefore - because the question has often been decided before we
have rational principles - it is not surprising that one has no difficulty in accepting as
acceptable reasons which have only an appearance of being sound.
Rather than following that route, Kant would try to supplement and make
more precise "the attempts of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume, which,
though imperfect and defective, have nevertheless come farthest in the dis¬
covery of the first principles of all morality."^126 This text also gives us
some indication as to where Kant hoped to find these principles. In the
"Announcement" of 1765 he tells us that he will "always consider philo¬
sophically and historically what actually happens before I indicate what ought
to happen" and that he will clarify the method according to which human
beings should be studied. We should not concentrate only on their chang¬
ing shapes that are the result of the environment they are found in, but
rather should concentrate on "the nature of man that remains always the
same, and upon his peculiar place in creation." This will tell us what we
should do while we seek the highest physical and moral perfection, while we
fall short of both in various degrees. Kant seems confident that what nature
tells us and what reason tells us will turn out to be the same.
It has become customary to divide Kant's so-called precritical period,
that is, the time before 1769—70, into at least two different phases. The first
is often called his "rationalist period," and the second his "empiricist pe¬
riod." According to this view, the first of these distinct phases lasted roughly
from 1755 to 1762, while the second began about 1762—3 and ended in 1769.
Its clearest formulation goes back to Erich Adickes, the editor of Kant's
"Handschriftlicher Nachlass" for the Academy edition of Kant's works.
Adickes called the first period Kant's "original epistemological standpoint,"
and he argued that at that time the "tendency of Kantian epistemology was,
in accordance with its aim and method, rationalist."^121 Indeed, he went so
far as to claim that Kant belonged during the first period to "the Leibniz-
Wolffian school." Though he admitted that Kant was also influenced by
Christian August Crusius, he still believed that Kant was so close to Leib¬
niz and Wolff in his aims, his method, and his fundamental principles that
"he can be called their disciple."^128 While not wanting to deny the exis¬
tence of "empiricist elements" in Kant's thought and acknowledging that
Kant was influenced by Newton even then, Adickes still held that Kant
was basically and most characteristically a rationalist during the fifties. Kant
not only was a methodological rationalist, that is, somebody who believed
that we should favor logical or mathematical procedures in our search for