It is difficult to interpret Kant's aim in the Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784) – the page and a half of generalities that precedes the nine “propositions” that constitute the body of the essay do not contain a clear statement of why he is enumerating and expounding these propositions. It might be thought that in these propositions Kant is stating the metaphysical presuppositions necessary to write a scientific history of human activities on a global scale, just as in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of two years later (1786) he lays out what he takes to be the metaphysical presuppositions of a unified terrestrial and celestial physical science. But Kant hardly suggests that he assumes that there is anything like a going practice of scientific history, and there is no hint that he intends his procedure in this essay to be understood as anything like that in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics of the year before (1783) or the subsequent Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, where the application of an “analytical” method to an established body of science unexpectedly reveals synthetic a priori propositions at its foundation. Indeed, Kant says nothing about the logical and epistemological status of his nine propositions, and thus raises no expectation that he will try to show them to be synthetic a priori presuppositions of any established scientific discipline.