KANT. 8 1 



an adherent of the Theory of Descent. Several very sig- 

 nificant expressions, to which Fritz Schultze, in his interest- 

 ing work on " Kant and Darwin,^^ has lately again called 

 attention, actually enable us to recognize Kant ^^ as the 

 earliest prophet of Darwinism. He expresses with perfect 

 clearness the great idea of an all-embracing, uniform evolu- 

 tion ; he assumes " a variation from the primitive type of 

 the tribe as the result of natural wandering." He even 

 declares that man originally moved on four feet, and that 

 it was only gradually that the human race raised their 

 heads proudly over those of their old comrades, the beasts. 

 But all these evidently monistic utterances are but stray 

 rays of light ; as a rule Kant adhered in Biology to 

 those obscure dualistic notions according to which the 

 powers which operate in organic nature are entirely 

 different from those which prevail in the inorganic world. 

 This dualistic, or two-sided conception of nature is still 

 dominant in school-philosophy ; most philosophers still 

 consider these two domains of natural phenomena as 

 entirely different. On one side is the field of inorganic 

 nature, the so-called "inanimate" world, where only 

 mechanical laws (causce efficientes) are supposed to operate, 

 of necessity and without purpose. On the other side is 

 the field of " animated " organic nature, all the phenomena 

 of which in their profoundest essence and first origin can 

 be made intelligible only by assuming pre-ordained pur- 

 poses, or so-called (causce finales) causes fulfilling a design. 



Although the question of the origin of animal and 

 vegetable species, and the allied question as to the creation 

 of man, remained until the year 1859 under the sway of 

 these false dualistic prejudices, and were very generally 



