CHAPTER I 

 THE MAKING OF WORLDS 



ACCORDING to the philosopher Kant, the two 

 L great wonders of human experience are "the 

 starry heavens above and the moral law within" ; and 

 it is interesting to remember that he was one of the 

 first (1755) to try to give a firm picture of the man- 

 ner in which the solar system might have attained to 

 its present form from a state of diffused and cold ma- 

 terial particles. Kant was one of the pre-Darwinian 

 evolutionists, and his evolutionism has now been ex- 

 tended from the stars above to the moral law within. 

 Kant was doubtless prescient enough to know that 

 this would happen, and wise enough to be assured 

 that it does not affect the dignity of anything to have 

 its history unravelled. 



§1. Laplace 9 s Nebular Hypothesis. 



Unaware of Kant's speculations, the mathematician 

 and astronomer Laplace published in 1796 certain 

 tentative suggestions of a cosmogony which became 

 widely known as the Nebular Hypothesis. Laplace 

 did not himself take his hypothesis too seriously, for 

 he speaks of his suggestions somewhat apologetically, 

 as "conjectures which I present with all the distrust 

 which everything which is not a result of observation 

 or of calculation ought to inspire." What Laplace 

 pictured was a vast, very hot gaseous mass, rotating 

 as a whole like a solid body, and filling more than the 



