While Kant was writing the Only Possible Ground, he prepared a submission to the contest, the Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals (1764). The treatise is known as the Prize Essay, although Kant only received second prize, behind Mendelssohn. Work on the Prize Essay put Kant in a stressful situation, not only because he had to meet the contest deadline, but also because he forced himself to engage with metaphysics on two levels—in the book, he pursued a first-order question on God’s existence, and in the essay, he examined the second-order question of whether such a pursuit is actually feasible. This forced Kant to question himself and the project of his book.