130 Kant: A Biographythree years I listened daily to his lectures I never noticed the smallest trace of arro¬
gance. He had an enemy, who wanted to refute him...^136Herder emphasized that Kant's only concern was the truth, that he wanted
no part of sects and parties, and that he did not seek mere followers. Apart
from Weymann, he seemed to have no enemies. Kant's "philosophy awak¬
ened one's own thinking."^137 He was a man of the world. "Human beings,
nations, natural history, physics, mathematics, and experience were the
sources from which he enlivened his presentation."^138
Herder exaggerated. He was writing more a hagiography than a biogra¬
phy. Nevertheless, Herder's account of this period is not entirely mislead¬
ing. Others felt the same way. Thus another student, Christian Friedrich
Jensch, supported Herder, saying
how interesting Kant was in his lectures. As if in an enthusiastic state, he appeared
and said: "this is where we stopped last time." He had learned his main ideas so deeply
and so vividly that he now lived in them and in accordance with them for the entire
period; and often he paid little attention to his textbook.
He lectured on Baumgarten. His copy was covered with notes all over. Hume, Leib¬
niz, Montaigne and the English novels of Fielding and Richardson, Baumgarten and
Wolff are mentioned by Kant as the works from which he learned the most. He thought
very highly of Tom Jones.^139
Herder also spoke of the effect that Kant had on him. He felt "captured
by the grace of the Kantian presentation, and caught up in {umschlungen) a
dialectical web of words in which he no longer thought of himself."^140
A number of Herder's notes, taken in Kant's lectures, have survived.^141
In the very short and incomplete notes on logic, we learn that the Stoics "ex¬
aggerated virtue" and that "no philosopher can be a Wolffian, etc. because
he must think for himself. Wolffand Crusius had to define and prove every¬
thing. Though they had examples of such errors before their eyes, they still
asserted their own errors." Kant advocated eclecticism, saying "we will take
what is good wherever it comes from," and he talked of the "noble pride to
think for oneself and to discover our own mistakes first." Though we must
look for truth before we look for beauty, he told his students "we demand
in all knowledge also beautiful things ... otherwise they are disgusting."^142
The notes from the mathematics lectures tell us little about Kant's views,
but just follow the textbook, and the notes on physics show that Kant was
still concerned with the problem of the divisibility of mathematical and ma¬
terial space, accusing the textbook of confusing the two kinds of space. Both
subjects seem to have been of little interest to Herder, and his notes on them