KANT AND EVOLUTION 551 



in proportion to the cube. 18 Kant seeks, by reasonings both obscure 

 and peculiar, to establish an a priori necessity that these two forces — 

 emanating from identical points and perfectly analogous save in the 

 direction of the motion of the external particles they affect — should 

 yet differ in the ratio in which their potency decreases with distance. 

 But in the " Universal Natural History " the disciple of Newton bases 

 no calculations, such as could be compared with the actual positions 

 and densities of the heavenly bodies, upon this quantitative formula — 

 of which, possibly, he had not yet bethought himself. In fact, in his 

 cosmogony he wholly fails to indicate even an approximate law of the 

 action of repulsive force. When the plot of the world-story threatens 

 to come to a standstill or to issue in a hopeless entanglement, " repul- 

 sion " like a deus ex machina appears upon the scene to set things right 

 and ensure a happy ending. Precisely the same particles, under what 

 (so far as one can judge from Kant's language) might be similar phys- 

 ical conditions, and at approximately equal distances, figure now as 

 attracting, now as repelling, one another, as the exigencies of the 

 hypothesis require. That a theorist who improvised laws of dynamics 

 in so easy-going a manner proves to have anticipated a very recent 

 conception of planetary evolution, must, I think, be regarded rather as 

 evidence of good luck than of scientific good management. 



"What, now, was, for Kant himself, the bearing of his doctrine of 

 cosmic evolution upon biology ? Descartes, holding the theory of animal 

 automatism, had undoubtedly regarded the formation of organisms as 

 part of that mechanical process of the redistribution of matter which 

 also explained the formation of suns and planets. Such a view was not 

 necessarily equivalent to a belief in the transformation of species. 

 There is no necessary logical connection (though there is a natural 

 affinity) between a mechanistic physiology and transformism — any 

 more than between a vitalistic physiology and the doctrine of the fixity 

 of species. Thus the question concerning the relation of cosmic evo- 

 lutionism to biology is merely the genetic form of the issue of vitalism 

 versus mechanism ; in it the problems of the tbeory of descent need not 

 be directly implicated. Upon this question a view current in Kant's 

 time was that the gradual generis of inorganic things might well be ex- 



18 Kant's conception of " repulsive force " is used by him in the " Physical 

 Monadology " primarily to explain the impenetrability of bodies (for which he 

 supposes that a special force must be posited). But it is not identical with 

 impenetrability; it is explicitly represented by him as a force acting in distans. 

 In the " Universal Natural History " it is rather to the phenomena of solutions 

 and the expansion of gases that Kant points as empirical evidence of the exist- 

 ence of such a force. Newton (" Optics," Bk. III., Q. 31) had made a like infer- 

 ence from the same phenomena; but he did not write, as Kant did, seventeen 

 years after D. Bernouilli had propounded the kinetic theory of gases. And it is 

 impossible to imagine Newton deducing a cosmogony by the use of a conception 

 so loose and quantitatively indefinite as is Kant's conception of repulsive force 

 in the " Universal Natural History." 



