50 Kant s Cosmic Evolution. 



It was not, however, till another century had 

 passed that the notion of development found a 

 place in modern science. In 1755, Immanuel 



N^Kant, the greatest of the German philosophers, 

 attempted to trace the evolution of the universe 

 from a primitive chaos to its present orderly array 

 of suns and stars, planets and satellites. The world 

 as it is, he said, is not the immediate product of 

 the divine creation. God has created matter, and 

 endowed it with forces ; and through the blind 

 play of these forces the primitive chaos has been 

 shaped, by a purely mechanical process, into cen 

 tral bodies with their planets, planets with their 

 moons, and so on in ever-widening circles till 

 the completed universe at last emerged, full of 

 order, harmony, and beauty. Half a century 

 later this theory of Kant s was independently 



\i established by Laplace, the greatest of French 

 mathematicians. 



The conception of evolution thus introduced by 

 Kant was not new to the countrymen of Leib 

 nitz. Like Kant s metaphysics and ethics, it was 

 appropriated, developed, and extended from nat- 

 ure^to spirit by Schelling and Hegel, through 



x whose influence it became a constituent element 



^Qa German habits of thought. Meantime, in Eng 

 land, it was^seized upon by geologists to account 



