198 Kant: A Biographymetaphysics. Causality presupposes temporality. In other words, Kant had
not been radical enough.
If this was not sufficient to call Kant's attention to Hume's relevance
for the new purely rational metaphysics, then the following must have
helped. The Königsberger gelehrte Zeitung published on July 5 and 12,1771,
a text entitled "Nachtgedanken eines Skeptikers" (Night Thoughts of a
Skeptic), which presented a dramatic monologue in the fashion of Edward
Young's Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742—45), a book
that was very popular in Germany at the time. As was quite common, the
author of the text was not identified. Since its prose sounded very much
like that of Johann Georg Hamann, who was not only known to be deeply
influenced by Young, but who was also the managing editor of the paper
and frequently published his own writings in this paper, many readers in
Königsberg and elsewhere would have identified Hamann as the author of
the piece.^38 Yet Hamann was not the author of these "Night Thoughts." He
was only the translator, and the real author was David Hume.^39 Kant would
have known that.
The "Night Thoughts of a Skeptic" represented a translation into
German of the Conclusion of Book I of Hume's Treatise. In the Treatise it¬
self, the translated section is simply called "Conclusion of this book."^40
Hamann gave it a more dramatic, yet quite fitting title. He also obviously
tried to obscure the origin of the text in other ways. Where Hume said in
his text "in England," Hamann put "in unserm Land" or "in our country,"
and he completely left out the last paragraph of Hume's Conclusion, be¬
cause it would have made clear to every reader that it was part of a much
larger work.^41
In the Conclusion of Book I of the Treatise, Hume discussed the causal
principle, but the thrust of his discussion here was entirely different from
that in the first Enquiry. In the Enquiry, Hume simply argued that our
knowledge of any particular causal connection cannot be based upon rea¬
soning a priori, but "arises entirely from experience, when we find that par¬
ticular objects are constantly conjoined with each other." In the Conclu¬
sion of Book I of the Treatise, he emphasized that the connection between
cause and effect "lies merely in ourselves" and that it is "nothing but" a "de¬
termination of the mind." In the Enquiry, it could appear that the causal
connection, though itself not objective, was somehow based upon the ob¬
jects themselves. In this passage, Hume claims that the causal relation is
entirely subjective. We may want to "push our enquiries, till we arrive at
the original and ultimate principle" of any phenomena, but we cannot.