to empirical science. Nevertheless, the discussions of Bilfinger, Baumgarten, and
on the other side the Newtonians and Pietists raised the issue of just how
causality might operate. For the Wolffians, the monads are windowless, caus-
ally unable to affect one another; the observed laws of the physical universe
must be due to preestablished harmony. This view was disliked by the New-
tonians; but their doctrine of a direct external influence, especially the action-
at-a-distance of gravitational force, appeared philosophically naive. A third
solution, Malebranchean occasionalism—the mediation of God—was too close
to the Pietist occultism that threatened university scientists on their home turf.
These disputes convinced Kant that there are limits to understanding causal
connections among objects themselves. This material became the basis for the
antinomies of reason in the first Critique.
The first turning point for Kant took place around 1765. The issue had
been provoked by the Berlin Academy, which had proposed the prize question
whether the principles of metaphysics and theology may be demonstrated with
the certainty of geometry. This was in effect Newtonian mathematical science
thumbing its nose at both Wolffians and Pietists, and the prize contest attracted
the major thinkers in Germany. Mendelssohn won with an anti-metaphysical,
anti-religious argument, Kant taking second place. Kant was suddenly over-
whelmed with skepticism. In his 1766 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer he rejected not
only Pietist occultism but rational metaphysics as well, on the grounds that
there is no knowledge beyond sensory experience. Crusius in the 1750s had
already made this claim in order to deny the validity of Wolffian metaphysics.
Empiricist skepticism was further bolstered by Hume, whose arguments had
been introduced to Kant already in 1759 by Hamann (Beiser, 1992: 54), no
doubt in support of the same debate of sentimentalists against mere reason.
Now Kant turned Crusius’s arguments back against the Pietists.
A second turning point came soon after Kant finally won his philosophy
chair in 1770. Still struggling to save some power of reason to give knowledge
of the causal interaction of things-in-themselves, in his inaugural dissertation
Kant posited two faculties of knowledge, sensibility and reason, with substance
and causality inhering in the latter, beyond the sensory screen of space and
time. Again the Berlin connection raised difficulties. Lambert, Kant’s corre-
spondent since both had participated in the prize contest of 1764, pointed out
that if there are two such distinct faculties as sensibility and reason, how can
they ever cooperate? This raised in epistemological form the classic deep
trouble of how distinct substances could interact—in this case subjective mind
and external object. Since Kant rejected preestablished harmony, Platonic
intuition of essences, and other access to occult qualities, he was forced to find
a new path.
In 1770–1772 Kant put the final ingredient in place: the distinction between
652 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths