Ixiv KANT'S UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY 



original nebulous matter, by which he tried to 

 explain the revolving and rotatory movements of 

 the great bodies of the visible universe. Descartes' 

 theory is too well known to need to be reproduced 

 here, 1 but it may be recalled that it ruled the 

 scientific reflection of the greatest mathematicians 

 of the time, including even Huygens, Fermat, and 

 Bernoulli, and that it was modified by Swedenborg 

 in a Vortical Cosmogony of his own as late as 

 1734. But Newton's searching and powerful criti- 

 cism gradually brought it into utter disrepute ; and 

 Kant seems to have entirely accepted Newton's 

 criticism, and to have been otherwise uninfluenced 

 by the Cartesian Vortices in detail. 



3. Kant and Newton. Newton's criticism of the 

 Cartesian Vortices is presented in various passages 

 of the Principia, but especially in the famous con- 

 cluding scholium, which contains not only his rejec- 

 tion of Descartes' hypothesis, but a cautious outline 

 of his own Mechanical Cosmogony. 2 It well illus- 

 trates his famous rule of method : Hypotheses non 

 fingo. Newton goes as far as the Law of Attrac- 

 tion will carry him, but no further. It does not 

 carry him beyond the bounds of the solar system, 

 which is viewed by him as entirely isolated from 

 the stellar universe beyond. And even in the 

 solar system that great Law only explains why the 



1 Excellent accounts of it by M. Faye and Mr. Geo. F. Becker, I.e. 

 2 See also Prindpia, Lib. n., '38, 40, 53, etc., and Optics, p. 

 3", 342. 



