 Yet Kant’s attitude towards his famous predecessor, whose ideas were extensively discussed in French, and later in Prussian intellectual circles after Leibniz’s death in 1716, never reaches equilibrium. This is unsurprising, for Kant’s own texts show an attraction to teleological theories of the whole, as well as to epistemological caution. Kant describes Leibniz as one of the greatest and most successful reformers of the modern era (9:32), along with John Locke, and as a genius, along with Isaac Newton (7.226). Yet he also refers repeatedly to the errors of the Leibnizians, whom he considers “dogmatic” philosophers. Their conviction that human reason could acquire knowledge of supersensible entities, including the soul and God, necessitated, in Kant’s view, a “critique.” Locke had attempted to construct a critical philosophy against the Cartesians but had failed to carry his programme through. At the same time, the attacks of Locke and Hume on metaphysics had “opened the door to Schwaermerei”. So determined were Kant’s contemporaries to find affirmations of immortality and divine justice, that, he believed, many had turned to the occult. “So much there was deceptive, that it is necessary to suspend the whole enterprise and to bring instead the method of the critical philosophy into play. This consists of examining the process of reason itself, of dividing and testing the human knowledge capacity in order to determine how far out its boundaries may be placed” (9.32).