394 Kant: A Biographythe Doctrine of Virtue (1797), and he had worked on them for a long time.
Still, much of the material they contain derives from his lectures, and there
is little in them that is new.^48 The Dispute of the Faculties (1798) consisted
of three essays. One of these was written in 1794, the second after Octo¬
ber 1795, and the third in 1796-97. The Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point
of View (1798) was entirely based on his lecture notes. Apart from this or¬
dering of papers, he wrote a few short essays and open letters dictated by
time and circumstances. His publications contained no fresh ideas, and they
were highly predictable, being entirely compatible with Jachmann's ob¬
servation that Kant was not quite himself any longer but had moments
in which he approached his former abilities. No longer lecturing, he could
spend more time on his literary pursuits, but he was not breaking new
ground. His health was questionable. Never possessing the vigorous health
that his "long dead friends often praised," he now defined "health" as a
period in which he neither suffered from sleeplessness nor had to sleep more
than two hours longer than usual, while being able to eat and to walk.^49
In May 1796, Kant had published one of his last articles in the Berlinische
Monatsschrift. It was entitled "Of a Recently Adopted Noble Tone in Phi¬
losophy" and seemed to be directed against J. G. Schlosser's Plato's Letters
about the State Revolution of Syracuse of 1795. Schlosser, Goethe's brother-
in-law, had been a government official in Baden, but he had retired and
was now concentrating on more philosophical matters. Not well disposed
toward Enlightenment theories, he was one of the most outspoken critics
of Basedow's school reforms, for instance.^50 He was convinced that most
children should not learn about "higher" things but instead should be¬
come accustomed to steady work. Schlosser also had developed a peculiar
kind of Platonic mysticism, involving the view that true knowledge is not
based on deductive reasoning but on intuition. In many ways, this view
was just another expression of the Gefühlsphilosophie or philosophy of feel¬
ing, which was then popular in certain circles. Schlosser was close to the
philosophical ideas of Jacobi and Hemsterhuis, but his mysticism was also
quite compatible with the Rosicrucianism that Frederick William II and
Wöllner had prescribed as the cure against the common philosophy of the
Enlightenment.
Kant had attacked this view in his still unpublished essay on "The Dis¬
pute of the Faculties"; and in the letter to Stäudlin in which he declined
publication, he had said that an ironic treatment of the kind of which
Lichtenberg was capable was perhaps the best way to counter such ob-