Ixii KANT'S UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY 



system. But with him it is the result of the New- 

 tonian force of repulsion acting between the minute 

 particles of falling matter, and it is applied to 

 account for the rise of the motions of rotation and 

 revolution in the solar system, a view not presented 

 in Lucretius. In 1755 Kant had probably little 

 sympathy with any of the other ancient Cosmo- 

 gonies ; and the exploration and rehabilitation of the 

 physics of the other Greek schools and thinkers, 

 such as the Ionic and Pythagorean schools, Herac- 

 litus, Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, 

 in which Hegel so greatly delighted and excelled, 

 had little or no meaning or interest for him. 

 We know from the quotation and reference on 

 p. 27 infra, that he had read the remarkable intro- 

 duction to the English Universal History of 1736, 

 "containing the Cosmogony, or creation of the 

 world" (pp. 1-51), and it probably contained all 

 that Kant then knew of the imaginative theories 

 of his predecessors. 1 It ranges in a discursive but 

 imperfectly informed way over the Cosmogonies of 

 the ancient peoples the Chinese, the Siamese, the 

 Hindus (' the Brachmans '), the Persians, the Baby- 

 lonians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, 

 etc. ; it then gives an account of the Vortices of 

 Descartes, of Burnet's Theory of the Earth, and of 

 Whiston's New Theory^ and winds up with a vindi- 



An Universal History from the Earliest Accoiint of Time to the 

 Present, the Introdiiction containing the Cosmogony, or Creation of 

 the World. 1736. 



