Note 263 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Against the intellectual influence thus set up by Kant there was none in contemporary Germany capable of resistance. Philosophy for the most part went in Kant’s direction, having indeed been so tending before his day. Rationalism of a kind had already had a representative in Chr. A. Crusius (1712–1775), who in treatises on logic and metaphysics opposed alike Leibnitz and Wolff, and taught for his own part a kind of Epicureanism, nominally Christianized. To his school belonged Platner (much admired by Jean Paul Richter, his pupil) and Tetens, “the German Locke,” who attempted a common-sense answer to Hume. His ideal was a philosophy “at once intelligible and religious, agreeable to God and accessible to the people.”263 Platner on the other hand, leaning strongly towards a psychological and anthropological view of human problems,264 opposed first to atheism265 and later to Kantian theism266 a moderate Pyrrhonic skepticism; here following a remarkable lead from the younger Beausobre, who in 1755 had published in French, at Berlin, a treatise entitled Le Pyrrhonisme Raisonnable, taking up the position, among others, that while it is hard to prove the existence of God by reason it is impossible to disprove it. This was virtually the position of Kant a generation later; and it is clear that thus early the dogmatic position was discredited.