ON THE ESSENCE OF GROUND

association whatsoever." Finally, world is also distinguished from any comprehensive concept of creatures "that is only a part of another such concept with which it stands in real association."³²

The essential determinations belonging to such a world may be derived from a twofold source. What must be present in any world is on the one hand "whatever follows from the general essence of things." In addition, everything that "in the positing of certain creatures may be recognized as necessary from the essential properties [43] of God."³³ Within metaphysics as a whole, the "doctrine of world" is therefore subordinate to ontology (the doctrine of the essence of, and most universal distinctions between things in general) and to "theoretical natural theology." World is accordingly the regional term for the highest unity of association in the totality of created beings.

If the concept of world thus functions as a fundamental concept of metaphysics (of rational cosmology as a discipline of metaphysica specialis), and if Kant's Critique of Pure Reason presents a laying of the ground for metaphysics as a whole,³⁴ then the problem of the concept of world must, corresponding to a transformation in the idea of metaphysics, attain an altered form in Kant. In this respect, however, it is all the more necessary to provide a pointer, albeit a rather concise one, since in addition to the "cosmological" meaning of "world" in Kant's anthropology, the existentiell meaning emerges once more, although without its specifically Christian hue.

Already in the "Dissertation of 1770," where the introductory characterization of the concept mundus in part still transpires entirely within the orbit of the traditional ontic metaphysics,³⁵ Kant touches on a difficulty in the concept of world that later becomes sharpened and expanded into a major problem in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant begins his discussion of the concept of world in the "Dissertation" by giving a formal determination of what is understood by "world": world as a "terminus" is essentially related to "synthesis": In composito substantiali, quemadmodum Analysis non terminatur nisi parte quae non est totum, h.e. Simplici, ita synthesis non nisi toto quod non est pars, i.e. Mundo. [Just as, in dealing with a complex of substances, analysis ends only with a part that is not a whole, i.e., with the simple; so synthesis ends only with a whole that is not a part, i.e., with the world.] In §2 he characterizes those "moments" that are essential for a definition of the concept of world: (1) Materia (in sensu transcendentali) h.e. partes, quae hie [44] sumuntur esse substantiae. [Matter (in a transcendental sense), i.e., the parts, which are here assumed to be substances.] (2) Forma, quae consistit in substantiarum coordinatione, non subordinatione. (Form,

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