184 Kant: A BiographyGerman philosophy of the traditional sort was to succeed. Most of these
problems seemed to have to do with the analysis of sensation in theoretical,
moral, and aesthetic contexts. Central among all of these was the problem
of a "moral sense." Many Germans thought that the British observations
could be built into a more rational account without substantial loss, and
their fundamental task became one of explaining how Wolffian theory could
account for the (apparently recalcitrant) facts discovered by the British.
Thus many philosophers conceived of their task - at least at first - as one
of (more or less simply) incorporating British "observations" into a com¬
prehensive "theory."
As Moses Mendelssohn noted at the occasion of a review of Edmund
Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful:
The theory of human sensations and passions has in more recent times made the great¬
est progress, since the other parts of philosophy no longer seem to advance very much.
Our neighbors, and especially the English, precede us with philosophical observations
of nature, and we follow them with our rational inferences; and if it were to go on like
this, namely that our neighbors observe and we explain, we may hope that we will
achieve in time a complete theory of sensation.^152
What was needed, he thought, was a Universal Theory of Thinking and
Sensation; such a theory would cover sensation and thinking in theoreti¬
cal, moral, and aesthetic contexts.^153 It would be comprised of British
"observations" and German (read: Wolffian) "explanations." He admitted
that such a reduction to reason might appear difficult in the case of moral
judgments, since our moral judgments "as they present themselves in the
soul are completely different from the effects of distinct rational principles,"
but that does not mean that they cannot be analyzed into rational and
distinct principles.^154 He suggested that our moral sentiments are "phe¬
nomena, which are related to rational principles in the same way as the
colors are related to the angles of refraction of light. Apparently they are
of completely different nature, yet they are basically one and the same."^135
The problem concerning a "moral sense" was for the Germans thus not an
isolated issue. It was one important part of the broader problem concern¬
ing the relation of sensibility and reason in general. The question was: how
could one unified theory be given of sensation and reason? The different
attempts at answering this question reveal that almost everybody thought
that an answer could only be found by showing or presupposing that these
two apparently different faculties are really expressions of one and the same