A Palingenesis and Its Consequences 183"immaterial world" is unknowable. He therefore believed that he was jus¬
tified in taking a strong skeptical position regarding this particular part of
metaphysics, and he claimed that he would from then on put aside the
entire matter concerning spirits as finished and completed. A wide field of
metaphysics would no longer concern him - or so he thought in 1765.
In the letter to Mendelssohn of April 6,1766, he confessed that, though
he valued metaphysics and considered it neither trivial nor dispensable, he
still thought that with regard to "the stock of knowledge currently avail¬
able, which is publicly for sale ... it [is] best to pull off its dogmatic dress
and treat its pretended insights skeptically."^149 Beck has aptly called this
phase in Kant's thought "quasi-Humean."^150 Kant, in the fashion of a true
skeptic, attempts to provide what he describes as a "propaedeutic" or, us¬
ing more skeptical terminology, a "catarcticon." He was well aware that the
"catarcticon" usually is purged together with the impurities it is adminis¬
tered to purge.
Not only was Kant not an orthodox Wolffian early on, he never became
a convinced empiricist either. Indeed, both his early students go out of their
way to make clear that Kant was not a "follower" in any sense, but somebody
who wanted to find his own way. As Herder put it: "He was indifferent to
nothing worth knowing," looking to find the truth wherever it could be
found, and not subscribing to any particular system. Kant was an "eclec¬
tic" and "Selbstdenker" in very much the same way as most of his contem¬
poraries. Dieter Henrich has claimed that "Kant became aware of the
general situation of ethics at the middle of the eighteenth century through
the opposition between Wolff's philosophia practica universalis and Hutch-
eson's moral philosophy, and his first independent formulation of an eth¬
ical theory resulted from a critique of these two philosophers."^151 While
this is not altogether false, it is not the whole truth either. There was no
thoroughgoing opposition of Wolffian and Hutchesonian ethics in Germany.
The Germans were not willing to abandon completely metaphysics of the
Wolffian type, but they were willing to admit that the traditional Wolffian
account was seriously incomplete because it had neglected the phenomena
of sensation. They discovered that British philosophers also had something
to offer; and since the relevant works were not only extensively reviewed
in many German journals, but for the most part also translated quickly,
many Germans were led to formulate a new problem or task for themselves.
The works of Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson,
and almost every other British philosopher of note were full of problems
that needed solutions and observations that needed to be explained, if