KANT AND EVOLUTION 539 



Yet even at the last, though Kant's nature-philosophy became less 

 "monistic," Haeckel finds his biology scarcely less evolutionistic. In 

 the " Kritik of Judgment " Kant, according to Haeckel, still " asserts 

 the necessity of a genealogical conception of the series of organisms, if 

 we at all wish to understand it scientifically." In the supposition of a 

 marked " change of view from Kant's earlier to his later years " with 

 respect to the applicability of the principles of natural causation in the 

 realm of the organic, Osborn concurs with Haeckel. Finally, the writer 

 of the historical article in the volume issued by English biologists in 

 commemoration of the Darwin centenary, declares that Kant may be 

 " best regarded as the culmination of the evolutionist philosophers " of 

 the eighteenth century. 4 



These accounts of Kant's historic position in relation to transform- 

 ism are interesting but scarcely accurate. Kant wrote for the most part 

 at a time when the conception of organic evolution had been made fa- 

 miliar by two of the most celebrated and most influential men of sci- 

 ence of the period, Maupertuis and Buffon. He was himself through- 

 out his life especially interested in two distinct scientific problems, both 

 of which made a consideration of the hypothesis of the mutability of 

 species inevitable, and an acceptance of it natural. He accordingly 

 more than once refers to it. But on no occasion does he unequivocally 

 express belief in it; and on several occasions, some of them in his 

 earlier, some in his "critical," period, he vehemently rejects it. The ut- 

 most that can be said for him as a biological evolutionist is that, late 

 in life, he once timidly coquetted with the hypothesis — speaking in a 

 vaguely favorable way of it in the text, and then in a definitely unfa- 

 vorable way in a footnote ; and that at the very end of the century it oc- 

 curred to him to wonder whether the higher apes may not yet acquire 

 a gait, speech and intellectual powers similar to man's. On the other 

 hand, it is not true that any such change of view as Haeckel and Os- 

 born have described took place in Kant's mind with respect to the possi- 

 bility of explaining the origin of organisms or the processes of organic 

 life in mechanistic terms. Kant at no time affirmed any such possibil- 

 ity; and he repeatedly gave expression to an emphatic denial of it, in 

 his earlier as well as his later utterances. Upon both this question and 

 the question of descent, so far as any change of emphasis is distinguish- 

 able at all in Kant's successive opinions, it is a change in quite the con- 

 trary direction to that which Haeckel indicates. 



These statements, in view of the wide prevalence of contrary be- 



* J. Arthur Thomson in " Darwin and Modern Science," p. 6. Similar ex- 

 ' pressions from a number of other writers might be cited. I have myself, before 

 coming to close quarters with the subject, fallen into the error of classifying 

 Kant among the early evolutionists (Popular Science Monthly, November, 1909, 

 p. 513). Yet for the past twenty years a substantially correct account of the 

 matter has been accessible, in a brief article by J. Brock, Biologisches Central- 

 blatt, Bd. VIII., 1888-9, pp. 641-8. 



