KANT AND EVOLUTION 543 



search seems to disclose is not in the least such as Kant imagined. 

 Kant himself is at pains to notify his readers, in his preface, that his 

 reasonings on the subject do not pretend to " extreme geometrical pre- 

 cision and mathematical infallibility." Yet it can not be denied that 

 in the body of the work Kant presents his hypothesis as if it could be, 

 and had been, established with rather more than a high degree of prob- 

 ability. 



If all the worlds and systems of worlds acknowledge the same mode of 

 origination; if attraction is unlimited and universal, while the repulsion of the 

 elements is likewise everywhere active; if in the infinite both great and small 

 are small alike; — then must not all these worlds have received the same relative 

 constitution and systematic arrangement as that which the bodies of our own 

 solar system exhibit on a small scale? ... If, again, these are viewed as mem- 

 bers in the great chain of Universal Nature, then there is still the same reason 

 to think of them, in turn, as existing in the same reciprocal relations and inter- 

 connections — which, in virtue of the primary structural law ruling all nature, 

 make of them a new and greater system, ruled by a body of incomparably 

 mightier attractive force at the center of their systematically ordered positions. 



Thus the whole universe will compose a single system held together 

 " by the connecting power of gravity and of centrifugal force." For if 

 it were made up, instead, of a multitude of irregularly scattered sys- 

 tems, of groups of stars not in revolution about a central body, Kant 

 argues that, in order to prevent the reciprocal attractions of these sys- 

 tems from " destroying them " there would be requisite 



such an exactly measured disposition of them at distances proportionate to the 

 attractions, that even the slightest displacement of them would bring about the 

 ruin of the universe. . . . But a world-order that could not maintain itself with- 

 out a miracle would lack that character of stability which is the distinguishing 

 mark of the designs of God. It is therefore far more consistent with those 

 designs to make the whole creation a single system in which all the worlds and 

 systems of worlds that fill the whole of infinite space stand related to a single 

 center. 8 



It will, I suppose, hardly be maintained, even by Kant's most devout 

 admirers, that in his argumentation in behalf of his " theory of the 

 heavens " he displays a high degree of scientific caution or a very nice 

 sense for the distinction between the considerations that are, and those 

 that are not, admissible in scientific inference. 



The second undeveloped problem which Newton had left to tempt 

 the ingenuity of his disciples was the problem of cosmogony. In attack- 

 ing this upon Newtonian principles Kant showed no greater originality ; 

 he had many forerunners in the enterprise, in the preceding half cen- 

 tury, and the enterprise itself was an obvious one. For the celestial 

 mechanics of Descartes had found one of its earliest and most striking 

 applications in a cosmogony. Descartes's first book, his " Traite du 

 Monde," written in 1633, had been chiefly a treatise on cosmic evolu- 



8 " Allgemeine Naturgeschichte," 1798 ed., pp. 77-85; tr. in Hastie, "Kant's 

 Cosmogony," p. 136 f. 



