Student and Private Teacher 85Wolff would have been critical and largely negative, but he was openly dis¬
cussed. Pietism in Königsberg contained a heavy dose of Wolff, and it was
for that reason different from Pietism elsewhere. Furthermore, there were
also convinced Wolffians in Königsberg. Few Wolffians were in official po¬
sitions at the university, but Marquardt was, and there were others among
the educated clergy. This had an influence on the discussion. People like
Fischer, who held views even more radical than those of the stricter Wolf¬
fians, stoked additional fires as well. Secondly, Aristotelianism, while wan¬
ing, still formed part of Königsberg's intellectual climate at the time. Yet
it was not just that the Aristotelian terminology was still pervasive; the
substance of Aristotelian logic and metaphysics was not entirely absent
either.^110 There may have been few convinced Aristotelians, but the eclec¬
tic spirit of some of the earlier Pietists kept this view alive. Finally, and
perhaps most importantly, Königsberg scholars were already looking to
Britain for the decisive philosophical developments, while the other Ger¬
man universities - with the exception of the new University of Göttin¬
gen — remained absorbed in the minutiae of the Wolffian and Thomasian
dispute.^111
Professors like Quandt, Salthenius, and Knutzen, however different they
may have been on almost every other matter, saw the real danger to religion
coming from the British Isles, not from German philosophers; and some
of them - most notably Knutzen - saw the real solution there as well. Fur¬
thermore, many of these religious conservatives were epistemologically
radical. Bayle and Montaigne were seen not so much as endangering faith,
but as refuting a way of thinking the faithful need not adopt. All the fer¬
ment of the period and all the recent philosophical ideas were present in
Königsberg: it was not an intellectual backwater. The practitioners of
philosophy at the university were neither the brightest nor the boldest, but
they were competent, and some of them, (Knutzen, for instance) were sound
in philosophy. An intelligent young man, such as Kant undoubtedly was,
could have picked up all that was necessary for a solid grounding in the
discipline, and he would have been provided with all the materials neces¬
sary for contributing to what he might have conceived of-as the "Growth
of the Sciences."^112
On the other hand, in the physical sciences and especially in astronomy,
Königsberg did not have the best the eighteenth century had to offer. Its
scientific mediocrity was typical of most other universities in Europe, but
it meant that Kant was not well prepared to make original contributions
to either theoretical or experimental physics. Apart from the fact that Kant