4io Kant: A Biographydeclared the manuscript as "his chief work... which represents his sys¬
tem as a completed whole," but then pointed out that future editors needed
to be cautious, because "Kant often deleted during his last years things
that were better than the ones he replaced them with." He also found that
he included in the book much that was nonsensical "(like the meals planned
for a given day)."^100 Rink wrote in 1801: "Kant now works on his Transi¬
tion from Metaphysics to the Physics of Nature; but it moves slowly, I do not
believe that he will live to see the end. It cannot be published as is under
any circumstances."^101 Kraus thought similarly. In any case, he later wrote
to Scheffner: "My poor head seems to be finished; it is like... the last
scribblings over which Kant died: no sense or understanding wants to en¬
ter into them."^102 Other scholars have given more credence to the old Kant's
judgment, and have argued that they bear witness to Kant's ultimate in¬
tentions.^103 What these intentions were is not clear to everyone. Thus it
has also been argued that the different titles indicate different books, and
that Kant was working on at least two different projects during his last
years. What we do possess is a great number of notes, outlines, sketches,
and perhaps even some final drafts of this projected work. Still, the work
has a fragmentary character. It is not clear what it is evidence for. Would
it have become a narrow project, meant to fill a certain gap in his system,
or would it have amounted to something much more ambitious, that is, the
very capstone of his system? We will never know, simply because Kant was
not able to finish it.^104
The manuscript, as reprinted in the Akademy edition, takes up almost
1,300 pages, but much of this material is repetitious. Kant treats "the same
matters ten and twenty times ... and almost always with such rich additions
and wide-ranging vistas that it is impossible to establish direct connections
between ideas by just omitting such perspectives."^105 It would be difficult
to edit the work with a pair of scissors, as it were. One of the earliest propo¬
nents of publication pointed out that only about one-fifth of the actual ma¬
terial "taken up individually and brought into proper order" would suf¬
fice to give a good insight into Kant's proposed work.^106 Such an edition
would take up about 260 pages. The English translation and edition of this
work by Eckart Förster and Stanley Rosen comes remarkably close to this
ideal. It is as good an edition of Kant's unfinished manuscript as there is.
Central parts of the Opus postumum suggest that what Kant wanted to
accomplish in his last work was the specification of the a priori principles
that a physicist must employ to achieve a systematic science of nature.
Such principles would have to be more specific than those he had discussed