Founder of a Metaphysics of Morals 321write an apologia."^21 ' This was to take the form of a review of Meiners's
Outline of the History of Philosophy. Kraus tried several times to say no. But
Kant did not let up, and so finally Kraus accepted the task.^212 Apparently,
like all attempts at writing something original, "it cost him frightful strain
and so much time that someone else might have been able to write an im¬
portant book in it."^213 He began his review in the middle of December
1786, but he finished it only some time in early March of 1787. While he
was proud of the review as a "true piece of bravura" {Kunststück), he also
said that Kant had really "forced him" to write it.^214 Meiners had tried to
explain away Kant's (still fairly recent) success as an aberration, claiming
that if the public knew the history of philosophy better, they would not fall
for his critical philosophy. Kraus criticized Meiners's history as unreliable
and explained Kant's "unexpected" success by saying that it showed the
philosophical public agreed with Kant. The review appeared in the first
week of April. Kraus told Hamann later that month that Kant had not been
satisfied with the review, that he had changed it, and he offered to provide
him with a reconstruction of the review "as he had intended or written
it."^215 So Kant was not above putting a great deal of pressure on a friend
to further the cause of his critical philosophy. Such pressure could only
strain the friendship.
Nor was Kraus the only one on whom Kant put pressure. The court
chaplain Schulz, who had published an Exposition of Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason in 1784, was also pressed into service in the fight for the Critique.
Schulz was more willing. In any case, Schulz published at least seven re¬
views on Kant and works relevant to Kant in the Allgemeine Literatur-
Zeitung during the years following the publication of his Exposition.^21 ^ But
Kant's relationship with Schulz was not without strains either. Thus Kant
was upset when Schulz published on December 13, 1785, a review of
J. A. H. Ulrich's Institutiones logicae et metaphysicae in the Allgemeine Lit¬
eratur-Zeitung. The work was important, for it contained criticisms of the
Transcendental Deduction. The reviewer had added his own doubts, and
Kant did not like it. In a long footnote to his Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science, he answered:
I find doubts expressed in the review of professor Ulrich's Institutiones... not against
[the] table of the pure concepts of the understanding, but to the conclusions drawn
therefrom as to the limitations of the whole faculty of pure reason and therefore all
metaphysics. In these doubts the deeply probing reviewer declares himself to be in
agreement with his no less examining author. Since these doubts are supposed to touch
the main foundation of my system... they should be reasons for thinking that my