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 hisÜber die Natur des Vergnügens, 1788/89), where he does not totally exclude the materialism of Helvetius, but includes his conception in a synthetic Kantian approach.