THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF WORLDS 407 



not out of the cobwebs of his mind as did Descartes, but from 

 the newest and solidest knowledge of the day. You will often 

 read that this effort of Kant's was a mere speculation. Such a 

 remark could come only from ignorance of the work itself. Kant 

 had deeply studied Newton ; he had studied Buffon ; he was 

 abreast with the scientific progress of his time. He sought a 

 mechanical explanation of cosmos, and he found it in the law 

 of gravitation. With the aid of this he endeavoured to group 

 the known facts of cosmogony into a working theory. How 

 well did he succeed ? 



Wright of Durham had pictured the Milky Way as an especial 

 system of stars. With this thought Kant links the observation 

 of Maupertuis as to the nebular patches in the sky. The latter 

 can be, he says, nothing else than similar heaps of stars. Since 

 they appear to have an ellipsoid form, they probably possess 

 the same shape as the galactic system to which we belong. 

 More or less after" the fashion of Lambert, Kant saw the universe 

 as made up of endless systems, of which our own is but a part, 

 and of which in turn our solar system is more or less a model. 

 The universe is for him infinite and endless ; we rise from 

 system to system until the mind is lost in a confused effort 

 to comprehend infinitude. 



He considers that gravitation is universal, estimates that 

 if any of the fixed stars belong to our system they may be so 

 distant that it would require a century of observation to disclose 

 their apparent motion. But if the universe be made up of 

 similar systems, it is evident that we have but to study the 

 one nearest at hand to understand the formation of them all. 

 If now we examine our especial planetary arrangement, we find 

 six considerable bodies the number then known revolving in 

 a common direction ; between them space is empty. There 

 seems only one way that this common motion could have been 

 impressed upon these widely separated bodies : they must once 

 have been all of one piece. In a word, these empty spaces 

 were once filled with a diffused material which, under the in- 

 fluence of gravitational attraction, would have steadily drawn 

 together. He says : 



" I assume that all the material now contained in the various 

 globes which belong to our solar world, in the beginning of 

 things was resolved into an elementary ground-substance occu- 

 pying the entire extent of the world in which the planets and 



