Abstract

As a member of the Illuminati Order, Karl Leonhard Reinhold wrote an – hitherto unknown – expert report about an internal manuscript on “The development of the forces of our mind” in January 1785. The manuscript had outlined a materialist theory of sensations and a conception of the interplay of the drives of pleasure and self-preservation. Reinhold, being in his early Kantian phase, criticized the materialism of this theory. In his own development, however, Reinhold returned soon to the topic of the drive of pleasure (in his.