Student and Private Teacher 65would hardly have approved of this practice.^15 For the strict Pietists, cards
were the "prayer-book of the devil," a road that led straight to hell. Kant
was unbothered by such considerations. Nor did these games interfere with
his studies or his tutoring - quite the contrary. In one of his lectures on
anthropology, he claims that playing cards "cultivates us, makes us even-
tempered, and it teaches us to keep our emotions in check. In this way it
can have an influence on our morality."^16 Kant would have made a good
poker player.
What would Kant's academic studies at the University of Königsberg
have been like? In 1700 there were twenty-eight German universities scat¬
tered throughout the different German states. Many of them were small.
Total enrollment at all the German universities was only 9,000 students.^17
By 1760 that number had decreased to 7,000, even though five new uni¬
versities had been founded (Breslau, Bützow, Fulda, Göttingen, and Er¬
langen). Heidelberg had only 80 students, and 20 of the other universities
had fewer than 300. Halle and Leipzig were larger, with more than 500 stu¬
dents each. The University of Königsberg probably had between 300 and
500 students for most semesters during the eighteenth century.^18 Part of
the reason for its relative success in attracting students was its location.
The "Albertina" was the only university in eastern Prussia, and indeed one
of the two major universities in Prussia. Students who wished to study
somewhere else had to travel far. Königsberg also attracted students from
the surrounding countries. It was an international university, with signif¬
icant numbers of Poles, Lithuanians, and students of other Baltic nation¬
alities in attendance.^19 Another advantage, at least after 1737, was the fact
that theology students graduating from the University of Königsberg were
the only ones in Prussia who were exempted from studying for two years
at the University of Halle.^20 Indeed, theology, and the university as a whole,
had been reformed in accordance with the principles established at the
University of Halle.
The geographical isolation of Königsberg had disadvantages. Johann
Georg Bock (1698—1762), professor of poetry and rhetoric, bitterly com¬
plained. He wrote in 1736 to his friend Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-
1766), the famous Wolffian philosopher and literary critic, who himself
had studied at Königsberg between 1714 and 1723: "as you know I live here
in a place where new foreign books and writings appear, just like comets,
only after long years."^21 As late as 1781, Ludwig (Adolph Franz Joseph)
von Baczko (1756-1823) wrote of East Prussia as a whole: We are "decried
as almost a learned Siberia; and owing to the great geographical distance