The German translation of Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth was published at Easter 1772, i.e. in the year in which Ka...
The German translation of Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth was published at Easter 1772, i.e. in the year in which Kant, in the process of his own independent development, came, as is shown by his famous letter to Herz,[16] to realise the mysterious, problematic character of a priori knowledge of the independently real. He was then, however, still entirely unconscious of the deeper problem which at once emerges upon recognition that a priori principles, quite apart from all question of their objective validity, are synthetic in form. We know that Kant was acquainted with Beattie’s work; for he twice refers to Beattie’s criticism of Hume.[17] What more probable than that he read the translation in the year of its publication, or at least at some time not very long subsequent to the date of the letter to Herz? The passages which Beattie quotes from the Treatise are exactly those that were necessary to reveal the full scope of Hume’s revolutionary teaching in respect to the general principle of causality. There seems, indeed, little doubt that this must have been the channel through which Hume’s influence chiefly acted. Thus at last, by a circuitous path, through the quotations of an adversary, Hume awakened philosophy from its dogmatic slumber,[18]and won for his argument that appreciation which despite its cogency it had for thirty years so vainly demanded. (...) Even mathematics and the natural sciences will have to be viewed as fulfilling a practical end, not as satisfying a theoretical need.
