the Great, the Wolffians were allowed to return; this led to a second round of
attacks, especially by Crusius, theology professor at Leipzig, the most promi-
nent German university, and safely outside Prussian jurisdiction. Wolffian
philosophy also came under pressure on a second front. The Berlin Academy,
though originally founded by Leibniz, gradually fell under the influence of
Newtonians, especially Maupertuis (at Berlin, 1744–1756) and Lambert
(1764–1777). The scientific prestige of the academy rose to world class with
the presence of Euler (1741–1765), the leading mathematician of his time, and
Lambert, who introduced hyperbolic functions into geometry and proved that
pi is an irrational number. This put a good deal of pressure on the Wolffians,
who generally taught university mathematics along with natural and moral
philosophy, to remain scientifically up-to-date.
Kant was at the intersection of all three factions. His upbringing was Pietist,
and he continued that sect’s antagonism to metaphysics and preference for
moralistic rather than theological religion. His academic contacts and sympa-
thies were Wolffian; his teacher at Königsberg, Knutzen, was a Wolffian in a
Pietist university, an Extraordinarius for 23 years who was never made an
Ordinarius. Throughout his career Kant taught from the Wolffian textbook of
Baumgarten, which provided much of the formal framework of the Critique
of Pure Reason. For Kant, Wolffian rationalism was a bulwark against Pietist
nature philosophy, which the followers of Thomasius propagated as a world
full of occult spiritual forces, unamenable to mathematics. One might have
thought that Kant would take the purely scientific route, made prestigeful by
the Berlin Academy; and indeed Kant in his early years was a Newtonian, and
an eager participant in Berlin prize contests. His 1755 cosmogenic theory is
based on Newtonian principles of gravitational attraction, in a vein similar to
the work of Lambert. Kant’s career opportunities in the university were con-
strained by the necessity to be an all-around teacher of the subjects within the
philosophical faculty, of which mathematics and natural science were less
significant than philosophy, and the best-rewarded route was into theology.
Kant taught all these subjects, and as his prospects for a chair grew, he
concentrated increasingly on putting them into the framework of philosophy.
The ingredients of Kant’s critical philosophy existed in these networks
before Kant pulled them into a distinctive combination. Leibniz had already
held that space and time are ideal rather than externally existent, mere aspects
of the order of monads (as indeed an abstract mathematician might see it). The
issue remained salient in the debate with the Newtonians, who held the
absolute existence of space. By 1770 Kant was expressing the Leibniz-Wolff
doctrine in the version that space and time are a priori categories of sensibil-
ity.^31 Kant was not yet ready to say the same thing about causality, which was
central both to Leibnizian philosophy (the principle of sufficient reason) and
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^651