In his Treatise on the Figure of the Stars (1732), Maupertuis described bright and elliptic phenomena in the night sky. Based on Maupertuis’s account of these astronomical observations, Kant developed an explanation of his own in his early book on the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). For him, these figures were seemingly stars, suns and even whole galaxies, subsystems orbiting a central body or a central sun, held by Kant to be the middle of the universe and a whole, an immense and immeasurable system of many uncountable solar systems. Since Kant did not read Maupertuis’s treatise, he derived his knowledge from a review of the Collected Essays of Maupertuis, in which the Treatise was published (1744). This review appeared in the Nova Acta Eruditorum in April 1745. Alongside this known source, another possible and complementary source on Maupertuis’s theory may have influenced Kant in his thinking: Gottsched’s philosophical textbook First Elements of all Philosophical Disciplines (5th edition, Theoretical part, Vol. I, 1748). The plate beneath the front matter of this book shows a picture of many solar systems. It depicts in detail, and according to Maupertuis’s account, comets signifying the center of different solar systems by the alignment of their tails, pointing in the opposite direction of the center. Gottsched’s book was known to Kant, who mentioned it in at least three lectures on logic. In addition, it was widely read in Königsberg’s intellectual and academic circles, since Gottsched was born not far from Königsberg and was a friend of Knutzen, Flottwell, Scheffner, the Imperial Countess of Keyserlingk, and others.

中文翻译：

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“一支难以理解的众多明星大军”——一块铜牌，以及康德在国家剧院举办的莫佩尔蒂招待会（1755年）

在他的星象论（1732），莫佩尔蒂描述了夜空中的明亮和椭圆现象。基于莫佩尔蒂对这些天文观测的描述，康德在他早期的关于天文学的书中提出了自己的解释。普遍自然历史和天体理论（1755）。对他来说，这些形象似乎是恒星、太阳，甚至整个星系、围绕中心天体或中心太阳运行的子系统，康德认为它们是宇宙的中心，是一个由无数太阳系组成的巨大且不可估量的系统。由于康德没有读过莫佩尔蒂的论文，他的知识是从对《莫佩尔蒂》的评论中获得的。论文集莫佩尔蒂 (Maupertuis) 的，其中论文出版（1744）。这篇评论出现在新博学学报1745 年 4 月。除了这个已知的来源之外，莫佩尔蒂理论的另一个可能的补充来源可能影响了康德的思想：戈特切德的哲学教科书所有哲学学科的首要要素（第五版，理论部分，第一卷，1748 年）。本书封面下方的图版展示了许多太阳系的图片。根据莫佩尔蒂的说法，它详细描绘了彗星通过彗尾的排列来表示不同太阳系的中心，指向中心的相反方向。康德知道戈特切德的书，他在至少三场逻辑讲座中提到过这本书。此外，这本书在柯尼斯堡的知识界和学术界也被广泛阅读，因为戈特谢德出生在距离柯尼斯堡不远的地方，并且是克努岑、弗洛特韦尔、谢夫纳、凯瑟林克帝国伯爵夫人等人的朋友。