 The suspension of the whole enterprise announced by Kant should not obscure the fact that Leibniz and Kant shared an ethico-religious conception of philosophy. Leibniz wrote in an era in which the universities were still dominated by Christian philosophy. Whatever his private leanings towards mystical and philosophical religion, he believed that a strong and unified religious authority was essential to the maintenance of moral and political order, and the content of morality did not strike him as problematic. Kant, though steeped in Protestant theology and moral philosophy, favoured the newer trend towards the academic autonomy of philosophy and secular morality and governance. Yet he had to contend with the rising influence of materialism and deterministic psychology in Germany (10:145); the sentiment- and convention-based accounts of morality and moral motivation of the British school, the attacks on metaphysics and conventional morals of Helvétius, La Mettrie (19:109), and Voltaire (15:336) and the attacks of Hume on religion and the concept of the soul. How could morality be reconciled with Newtonian science and how could the existence of ineluctable duties be established in the face of the variety of human practices and customs established by Montesquieu and the numerous travel writers on whose accounts Kant relied in compiling his lectures on Anthropology? Metaphysics could not provide knowledge of the supersensible, including the existence of God, the possibility of the realization of a highest good in the natural world, or the ability of human beings to realize that good through their endowments. Human aspirations in this regard were transcendent, futile, and “entirely vacuous” (20: 301).