Hume's Sparkle in Kant's Dreams

Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics is one of the significant works from Immanuel Kant’s so-called "pre-Critical" period, published in 1766, fifteen years before the Critique of Pure Reason. In this essay, Kant examines and critiques the claims of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scholar and mystic, regarding access to a transcendent, supersensible world. The question of this paper is whether Kant’s critique of Swedenborg’s claims was influenced by Hume. If so, which fundamental concepts in the essay Dreams reflect this influence? In the present paper, we read Dreams in light of Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, a work that Kant is believed to have studied before writing Dreams. Through an analysis of both works, we ultimately conclude that some of Kant’s most important positions in Dreams, including his critique of metaphysics, his empirical interpretation of causality, and his understanding of metaphysics as "the science of the limits of human reason," were directly influenced by Hume.