The year 1765 was marked by the publication of Leibnitz's posthumous
_Nouveaux Essais_, in which his theory of knowledge is more fully
stated than in any of his previous tracts. In all probability Kant
gave some attention to this work, though no special reference to it
occurs in his writings, and it may have assisted to give additional
precision to his doctrine. In the curious essay, _Dreams of a
Clairvoyant_, published 1766, he emphasizes his previously reached
conclusion that connexions of real fact are mediated in our thought by
ultimate notions, but adds that the significance and warrant for such
notions can be furnished only by experience. He is inclined,
therefore, to regard as the function of metaphysics the complete
statement of these ultimate, indemonstrable notions, and therefore the
determination of the limits to knowledge by their means. Even at this
point, where he approximates more closely to Hume than to any other
thinker, the difficulty raised by Hume does not seem to occur to him.
He still appears to think that experience does warrant the employment
of such notions, and when there is taken into account his
correspondence with Lambert during the next few years, one would be
inclined to say that the _Architektonik_ of the latter represents most
completely Kant's idea of philosophy.
On another side Kant had been shaking himself free from the principles
of the Leibnitzian philosophy. According to Leibnitz, space, the order
of coexisting things, resulted from the relations of monads to one
another. But Kant began to see that such a conception did not accord
with the manner in which we determine directions or positions in
space. In the curious little essay, _On the Ground of distinguishing
Particular Divisions in Space_, he pointed out that the idea of space
as a whole is not deducible from the experience of particular spaces,
or particular relations of objects in space, that we only cognize
relations in space by reference to space as a whole, and finally that
definite positions involve reference to space as a given whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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