letter. In 1770, however, he sent his inaugural dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World. In acknowledging the receipt of this letter, Lambert accepts the conclusions of Kant as to the intuitional basis of time and space, but denies that time is merely an a priori form of sensibility on the ground that changes in consciousness necessitate the reality of time.
This correspondence, we observe, began in 1765. At this period Kant had already broken away from the fundamental ontological fallacy of the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, and had made the distinction between formal or mathematical, and material or metaphysical truth. This is shown by the essays that appeared from 1762 to 1763. Kant could not, therefore, have been indebted to the corresponding suggestions of Lambert. He had furthermore already arrived at a conviction of the need of a new method in philosophy, which should serve as a criterion for metaphysical speculation, for he himself so states, both in his letter to Lambert and also in a letter to Bernouilli. Again, Lambert's profound conception of the necessity of basing philosophical reasoning upon what is now called the theory of knowledge was probably not new to Kant. Even before this, he was reported to have said that "Metaphysic is nothing but a philosophy of the first principles of our knowledge."[1] Consequently we cannot regard these most Kantian views of Lambert as more than historical coincidences.
There is, however, one doctrine which, we think, may possibly be of more historical importance. I refer to Lambert's repeated discussion of the problem of mathematical judgments. The reason of the great progress of mathematical science, Lambert declares, is that it is based on simple, homogeneous concepts, heterogeneous elements never being introduced.[2] Not only this, but the mathematician starts with intuitions, not with arbitrary definitions. Now it is quite possible that we have here the germ of the celebrated theory of the Transcendental
