544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tion based upon mechanical principles. That book had, it is true, been 

 suppressed by its author, who, upon hearing of the treatment received 

 by Galileo, had preferred to take no chances for the prize of martyr- 

 dom. But he had in Pt. V. of the " Discourse on Method " recapitu- 

 lated briefly the outline of his scheme of world-evolution; in the 

 " Principia " he had given some of the details of it ; and the treatise 

 itself, or a revision of the principal part of it, had been published after 

 his death by his friend Clerselier, in 1664. "While refraining, with 

 what might seem sufficiently unimpeachable orthodoxy, from maintain- 

 ing that the present constitution of the world actually had been evolved, 

 rather than created ready made, Descartes also insisted that it was 

 perfectly conceivable that it should have been evolved. He declared 

 himself ready, if given as a starting point even " a chaos more confused 

 and involved than any poet ever could describe," to deduce, with the 

 aid only of the ordinary laws of the motion of matter, the necessity of 

 the gradual formation out of that primeval chaos of a world having 

 the characters and the contents of the world as man now finds it. He 

 endeavored to show how matter "must needs, in consequence of those 

 laws, have arranged itself in a certain way which made it similar to our 

 heavens ; how some of its parts would necessarily become an earth, and 

 some planets and comets, and others a sun and fixed stars. And . . . 

 coming to speak more particularly of the earth," he set forth, "how 

 the mountains, seas, fountains and rivers can naturally have been 

 formed in it, and the metals have come to exist in the mines, and the 

 plants to grow in the fields, and, in general, how all the bodies which 

 are called mixed or composite could have been generated." 



Now, it is certain that Kant had the cosmogony of Descartes in 

 mind in writing the "Universal Natural History," for he refers to 

 it in his preface. Defending himself against the imputation of ma- 

 terialism and irreligion, Kant writes: 



I shall not be refused the justice which fair judges have always rendered to 

 Descartes, with respect to his attempt to explain the formation of the world 

 from purely mechanical laws. I therefore cite the remark upon this subject of 

 the authors of the " Universal History " : " We can not but think the essay of 

 the philosopher who endeavored to account for the formation of the world in a 

 certain time from rude matter, from the sole continuation of a motion once 

 impressed, and reduced to a few simple and general laws; or of others who have 

 since attempted the same, with more applause, from the original properties of 

 matter, with which it was endued at the creation, is so far from being criminal 

 or injurious to God, as some have imagined, that it is rather giving a more 

 sublime idea of his infinite wisdom." 10 



Thus Kant, anticipating vituperation from the orthodox on account 

 of his cosmic evolutionism, pleads not only the Cartesian precedent, but 



10 The version of the citation here given is that of the original English, as 

 in Hastie's " Kant's Cosmogony." 



