A 1 Wer wollte sich mit Grill So lang'uns Lenz und Jugend Die Freude winkt auf aller Die durch diess Pilgerleben g Sie bringt uns selbst den Kr Wann wir am Scheidewege ste At SUPPLEMENT TO THE SECOND VOLUME it Grille | Jugen lütentag ten zie uf allerAs S the abbot Barruel has completely massacred a passage of the following highly interesting and sublime (but in some parts perhaps difficult) philosophical treatise of Kant, lebensee German Museum, no. 4, p. 353), I have faithfully OF THE GERMAN MUSEUM. translated the whole work from the German, and request you en Kra(Mr. Geisweiler) will be kind enough to give it a place in your Museum, that the candid and learned may have an opportunity of judging of this great man's mode of philosophi- · sing, without looking through the medium of party spirit and heat, which so easily disfigures objects: Altenburg, in Saxony, ge ste 12th Nov. 1800. I. R. IDEA OF A UNIVERSAL HISTORY, WITH A BY EMANUAL KANT. WHATEVER be the conception of the liberty of the will, which one forms to himself with a metaphysical view, the phenomena of the will, human actions, are determined, just as well as every other event of nature, according to universal laws of nature. It is to be hoped that the history, which is occupied in the narrative of these phenomena, however hidden their causes may be, when it contemplates the play of the liberty of the human will in the main, will discover a regular course of them; and in such a manner, that what is obviously implicated and irregular in single subjects, will be VOL. II. cognised F cognised in the whole species as a continually progressive, though slow, unfolding of their original predispositions. Thus marriages and the births and deaths arriving from them, seem, as the free will of men has so great an influence on them, to be subjected to no rule, according to which their number can be previously determined by reckoning; and yet the annual tables of them in great nations evince that they happen just as much according to constant laws of nature, as the so inconstant temperatures of the air, whose happening cannot be previously determined singly, but which, on the whole, fail not to maintain the growth of plants, the run of rivers, and other dispositions of nature, in a uniform uninterrupted course. Individuals and even whole nations little think that, while they every one to his own mind, and the one often contrary to the other, prosecute their own purposes, they go on unobserved, as if guided by a clew, in the design of nature that is even unknown to them, which design, were it known to them, would signify very little to them. As men, on the whole, proceed not in their pursuits con-formably to instinct merely, like animals and yet not according to a concerted plan, like rational citizens of the world; it seems that no history of them agreeable to a plan (as of the bees and beavers) is possible. One cannot forbear a cer tain indignation at seeing their actions represented upon the great theatre of the world; and, notwithstanding the now and then seeming wisdom of individuals, at finding at last every thing in the gross composed of folly, of childish vanity, and often of childish wickedness, and the rage of destruction: so that one is finally at a loss what sort of a conception he ought to form of our species, so conceiled of its pre-eminence. There is here no expedient for the philosopher but, as he cannot at all presuppose in mer. and in their actions, in gross, any rational design of their own, that of endeavouring to discover in this paradoxical course of human affairs a design of nature, from which a history of creatures, that proceed without a plan of their own, is nevertheless possible according to a determinate plan of nature.-Let us see whether we shall succeed in finding a clew to such a his-tory; and we shall then leave nature to produce the man, who is able to compose it according to that clew. She thus produced a Kepler, who subjected in an unexpected manner to precise laws the eccentric orbs of the planets; and a Newton, who explained these laws from a universal cause of nature. POSITION POSITION THE FIRST. All the predispositions of nature of a creature are destined, some time or other, to be developed completely and conformably-to-end. This is confirmed in all animals, as well by the external observation, as by the internal, or that by means of dissection. An organ that shall not be used, a disposition which does not attain its end, is a contradiction in the teleological natural philosophy. For, if we depart from this principle, we have no longer a nature acting according to laws, but a nature playing to no end: and comfortless chance steps into the place of the clew of reason. POSITION THE SECOND. In man (as the only rational creature upon earth) those predispositions of nature, which tend to the use of his reason, are to be completely developed in the species only, but not in the individual. Reason in a creature is a faculty to extend both the rules and the designs of the use of all its powers far beyond instinct, and knows no bounds to its projects. It however acts, not conformably to instinct, but requires essays, exercise and instruction, in order to proceed by little and little from one degree of insight to another. Hence would a man need to live to an extreme old age, to learn to make a complete use of all his predispositions of nature; or, if nature has made his lifetime but short (as is really the case), she requires perhaps an indefinite series of generations, the one of which hands down their enlightening to the other, in order to force at last its germe in our species to that degree of developement, which is completely suitable to her design. And this point of time must, at least in the idea of man, be the aim of his exertions, as otherwise the predispositions of nature must for the most part be considered as in vain, or to no end, which would annul all practical principles and thereby render nature, whose wisdom must serve for a principle in the judgment of all other dispositions suspected in man only as a childish play. POSITION THE THIRD. Nature has willed that man shall unfold out of himself entirely every thing that transcends the mechanical disposition of his animal existance and partake no other felicity or perfection, than what he has procured for himself, free from instinct, by his own reason. Nature does nothing superflously and and is not lavish in the use of means to her ends. As she has given man reason and liberty of the arbitrement built upon it; that is a clear proof of her design with regard to her establishment. He is not destined to be guided by instinct or to be provided with knowledge communicated by the creation, and instructed by it; he is rather to develope every thing out of himself. The discovery of his food, of his clothing, of his external security and defence (for which she gave him neither the horns of the bull, the paws of the lion, nor the teeth of the dog, but merely hands), all the pleasures that can make life agreeable, his very insight and prudence, and even the good quality of his will, must be his own work entirely. She seems here in her greatest parsimony to please herself and to measure her animal establishment so frugally, so exactly to the greatest want of an inceptive existance, as if she had a mind that man, when he shall have once raised himself by his own exertions from the greatest address, to internal perfection of the cast of mind and thereby to felicity (as much as it is possible upon earth), should have the sole merit of it and to thank himself only; as if she had designed every thing, more with a view to his rational self-estimation, than to a wellbeing. For in this course of human affairs there is a host of troubles and difficulties ready to assail mankind. It seems to be the aim of nature, however, that he should not lead a vita suavis; but that he should so exert himself, as by his conduct to render himself worthy of life and of wellbeing. It always remains, here amazing that the earlier generations seem to execute their toilsome business but on account of the later, in order, as it were, to prepare a scaffold, by which these may still raise the building that nature designs to erect; and that the latest generations only will have the good fortune to inhabit the edifice, at which a long rank of their progenitors had laboured (though not intentionally) without having been able to participate the good fortune which they prepared. But, how enigmatical soever this is, it is at the same time necessary, when it is once assumed that a species of animals are to have reason and, as a class of rational beings who all die, but whose species is immortal, to attain a completeness of the unfolding of their predispositions. POSITION THE FOURTH. The means, which nature uses to bring about the developement of all her predispositions, is the antagonism in society, so far as it is at last the cause of a legal order of society. I here understand by antagonism the unsociable sociableness of men; |