Saffron, I asked a person with extensive knowledge of Thoreau's life whether I was right in believing that Thoreau read none of Kant's philosophical works, and this is what I got: "I am not aware that he ever read anything by Kant, or mentioned Kant."
From secondary sources like this
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/Lit ... um-13.html
Thoreau, Emerson, and Transcendentalism
I see how one might come to believe that Thoreau was a Kantian Transcendentalist and had studied Kant deeply.
Nevertheless, if Thoreau read any of Kant's philosophical works, then there should be some evidence somewhere, and in the biographies and writing available to me I have found none.
In The Early Literary Career Transcendental Apprenticeship, 1837-1844
http://www.walden.org/Institute/thoreau ... ading2.pdf
(4.6 MB PDF file, about 15 minutes to download with slow access, too long for me to continue the search in this text)
"At the same time, Thoreau was also reading a more purely philosophical
treatise that summarized the tenets of this school of natural
philosophers, J. B. Stallo's General Principles ofthe Philosophy of Nature,
a work that contained, in addition to Stallo's exposition of the
various "Evolutions" (his term for the various changes of form and
development observable in nature), chapters detailing the views of
Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Oken, and Hegel. Stallo pays homage to "Father
Goethe," as he calls him, as the progenitor of this school of
thought, and distinguishes its principles from those of both the natural
theologians and the materialists."
That is the only thing about Thoreau reading Kant that I have found.
Tom