538 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



KANT AND EVOLUTION 



By Professor ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY 



THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 

 I 



IT has come to be one of the generally accepted legends of the his- 

 tory of science that the author of the " Kritik der reinen Ver- 

 nunft " was also a pioneer of evolutionism. In the anthropological es- 

 says of the Koenigsberger, for example — we are assured by the writer 

 of a German treatise on Kant's philosophy of nature 1 — " we already 

 find the most essential conceptions of the modern theory of descent 

 indicated, at least in germ — and, indeed, in a way that marks Kant out 

 as a direct precursor of Darwin." The same expositor says : 



Throughout these writings the idea of evolution plays everywhere the same 

 r6le as in contemporary science. . . . The series of organisms is for Kant in a 

 constant flux, in which the seemingly so stable differentiae of genera and species 

 have in reality only a relative and subsidiary significance. 



And in a famous passage of the " Kritik der Urteilskraft," says 

 another writer, " the present-day doctrine of descent is clearly expressed 

 in its fundamental features." 2 Haeckel, who is in the main followed by 

 Osborn, goes even farther in his ascription of Darwinian and " monis- 

 tic " ideas to Kant's earlier works, though he thinks that in later life 

 Kant fell from grace. Haeckel says : 3 



In various works of Kant, especially in those written in his earlier years 

 (between 1755 and 1775) are scattered a number of very important passages 

 which would justify our placing him by the side of Lamarck and Goethe as the 

 principal and most interesting of Darwin's precursors. ... He maintains the 

 derivation of the various organisms from common primary forms, . . . and was 

 the first to discover the principle of the " struggle for existence " and the theory 

 of selection. For these reasons we should unconditionally have to assign a place 

 of honor in the history of the theory of development to our mighty Koenigsberg 

 philosopher, were it not that, unfortunately, these remarkable monistic ideas of 

 young Kant were at a subsequent period wholly suppressed by the overwhelming 

 influence of the dualistic, Christian conception of the universe. 



1 Drews, " Kants Naturphilosophie," 1894, pp. 44, 48. 



2 Schultze, " Kant and Darwin," 1875, p. 217. Schultze's monograph, per- 

 haps the earliest, and hitherto the most comprehensive, on the subject, seems to 

 be responsible for much of the error into which subsequent writers have fallen. 

 It consists, indeed, chiefly of reprints of the greater part of each of the writings 

 in which Kant approaches the topic in question; but it is accompanied by a 

 commentary and notes in which Schultze gives a highly misleading impression 

 of Kant's actual utterances. 



8 "History of Creation," Lankester's translation, 1892, p. 103. Cf. Osborn, 

 " From the Greeks to Darwin," 1894, pp. 98-9. 



