104 Kant: A Biographyothers," after having refuted "different deceptions of the power of imag¬
ination."^15 Hamann did not find everything he was looking for, but Kant's
"bright ideas" did fascinate him. What we see in Hamann's letter may well
be a glimpse of the earliest reputation of Kant. He had many "bright ideas,"
which looked promising, even if they were not always well thought out.
Kant's academic disputations form the background of the more popu¬
lar work on cosmogony that appeared in 1755, namely the so-called Gen¬
eral History. The plan for writing this work dated back to 17 51, when Kant
read in the Hamburgischen freien Urtheile a review of Thomas Wright of
Durham's theory of the universe.^16 Parts of the work were probably writ¬
ten during his absence from Königsberg, but it was most likely completed
there.^17 In any case, it was published "at the advice of his friends" so that
his system would be noticed by the king and therefore might be further
investigated and perhaps be given mathematical precision by others.
Some philosophical scholars believe that the General History contra¬
dicts the claims that Kant advanced in his formal Latin writings or that,
at the very least, the work is so different in style and doctrine from them
that it almost seems as if it had been written by a different man. But this
is not really so. To be sure, the academic writings are very formal. They
had to be. Kant had to obey the language and the form of the academy.
The General History addresses a wider audience. It deals, moreover, with
a strictly physical problem, namely the material origin of the world. The
other writings deal either with exclusively metaphysical problems or with
problems concerning the application of metaphysics to physics. In the Gen¬
eral History, metaphysics has receded into the background. In it, Kant
wanted to show how we could explain, by mechanical principles alone,
how the world arose. The mechanical principles were of course those of
Newton.^18
Kant postulated, "as an immediate consequence of God's being," a kind
of basic matter that fills the entire universe. Though this basic matter had
from the start a basic striving for perfection, implanted in it by God, it was
at first without motion. The first motion cannot come from God; it must
be derived from the forces of nature itself. Kant tried to derive it by using
the force of attraction, which causes the matter, which is unevenly distrib¬
uted in the universe, to contract into a central body. On the other hand,
there is also the force of repulsion, which causes the parts of matter that
are moving toward the central body to collide and form other bodies, which
move in different directions. Through the interactions of the forces of at-