HUME TO HEGEL In 1763 the Berlin Academy set as a prize question ‘whether metaphysical truths can be demonstrated with the same certainty as truths of geometry’ Kant’s (unsuccessful) entry for the prize underlined a number of crucial distinctions between mathematical and philosophical method Mathematicians start from clear deWnitions which create concepts which they then go on to develop; philosophers start from confused concepts and analyse them in order to reach a deWnition Metaphysicians rather than aping mathematicians should follow Newtonian methods, by applying them not to the physical world but to the phenomena of inner experience The programme that Kant lays out here for the philosopher closely resembles that which Hume had set himself, and later Kant was to credit Hume with having woken him from the ‘dogmatic slumber’ of the years when he accepted the philosophy of Leibniz and WolV It is not certain when Kant began the serious study of Hume, but during the 1760s he became increasingly sceptical of the possibility of a scientiWc metaphysics The anonymous, skittish Dreams of a Ghost Seer of 1766 compared metaphysical speculations with the esoteric fantasies of the visionary Immanuel Swedenborg Among other things, Kant emphasized, in the wake of Hume, that causal relations could be known only through experience and were never matters of logical necessity However, his inaugural dissertation as professor in 1770 (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World) still shows the strong inXuence of Leibniz The Wrst eleven years of his professorship were spent by Kant in developing his own original system, which was published in 1781 in The Critique of Pure Reason, a work which at once put his pre-critical works in the shade and established him as one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age He followed it up with a briefer and more popular exposition of its ideas, the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783), and republished it in a second edition in 1787 Kant’s aim in his critical philosophy was to make philosophy, for the Wrst time, fully scientiWc Mathematics had been scientiWc for many centuries, and scientiWc physics had come of age But metaphysics, the oldest discipline, the one which ‘would survive even if all the rest were swallowed up in the abyss of an all-destroying barbarism’, was still far from maturity Metaphysical curiosity was inherent in human nature: human beings could not but be interested in the three main objects of metaphysics, namely, God, freedom, and immortality But could metaphysics become a true science? 101