KANT AND EVOLUTION 541 



historic relations of his cosmic evolutionism to that of both his prede- 

 cessors and his successors. The matter has never, it seems to me, been 

 quite justly set forth. It will at the same time be pertinent to observe 

 the position with respect to organic evolution in which Kant's cosmic 

 evolutionism left him. 



The great, outstanding scientific event of the early eighteenth cen- 

 tury was the triumph of the Newtonian system of celestial mechanics, 

 based on the principle of gravitation in accordance with the law of in- 

 verse squares, over the Cartesian system of vortices, which had domi- 

 nated seventeenth century physics and astronomy. Now Descartes, a 

 more versatile and ingenious and a bolder mind than Newton, had him- 

 self elaborated his physical theories into a comprehensive philosophy of 

 nature and a fairly detailed cosmology and cosmogony. But Newton 

 had inscribed upon the last page of the " Principia " the maxim hypoth- 

 eses non jingo; moved both by scientific caution and by religious piety, 

 he had deliberately refrained from putting forward either a general 

 system of the heavens outside of the solar system or a mechanistic ex- 

 planation of the genesis of the revolutional and rotatory motions and the 

 arrangement of the planets of our system. " All these regular motions," 

 declared the concluding scholium of the great treatise, " do not have 

 their origin from mechanical causes. . . . This most elegant structure 

 of sun and planets and comets could not have arisen apart from the 

 wisdom and the rule of an intelligent and powerful being." And New- 

 ton sums up with, as it were, a " let us hear the conclusion of the whole 

 matter," by which he would define the whole duty of explanatory as- 

 tronomy : Satis est quod gravitas revera existat, et agat secundum leges 

 a nobis expositas, et ad corporum cwlestium et maris nostri motns omnes 

 sufficiat. " It is enough that gravity really exists, and that it acts ac- 

 cording to the laws which we have set forth, and that it suffices for all 

 the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea." 



But to many of those who devoted themselves with enthusiasm to 

 the propagation of Newton's positive doctrines, the self-denying ordi- 

 nance with which he had ended was far from agreeable. That that 

 ordinance should be transgressed by more intrepid and more architec- 

 tonic minds was inevitable. We find, therefore, in the early eighteenth 

 century a number of writers who busied themselves with the further 

 elaboration of the Newtonian "natural philosophy," with the applica- 

 tion of Newton's laws to problems the master himself had refused to 

 discuss. In these attempts the writers in question were in part merely 

 doing over again upon Newtonian principles what had already been 

 done upon Cartesian principles (now discovered to be erroneous) by 

 Descartes himself. Among the German enthusiasts for the completion 

 of Newton's system and the extension of it into a general cosmology, 

 one of the most zealous and most active was the young Kant. His early 

 preoccupation with these matters was doubtless due to the influence of 



