Much, of course, can be said of Kant's precritical development. The quantity of works and the broad range of topics with which he was concerned make it virtually impossible to summarize any one line of thought, and I do not intend to provide such a summary. Nevertheless, it is certainly uncontroversial to start with the fact that recurrent throughout these early writings is the attempt to find a method appropriate for metaphysics. Thus, in this chapter I argue that Kant's discovery of transcendental illusion was broadly grounded in this search for method and the consequent recognition that problems about method are bound up with the limited nature of our faculties of knowledge. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, I sketch out some of those themes in Kant's early precritical writings that are relevant to his subsequent theories of metaphysical delusion and illusion; second, I examine Kant's use of the notion of delusion as generating metaphysical error, a notion, as we shall see, that figures predominantly in the Dreams of a Spirit Seer (Träume eines Geistsehers [1765]); and, third, I review some of Kant's correspondence throughout the 1760s.

The Early Works

It is commonly noted that Kant's concern to secure the proper method for metaphysics issued from a long-standing debate over the respective virtues of the deductive (mathematical) method employed by the rationalist metaphysicians (Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff) and those of the inductive method advocated by the Newtonians.