Ixxxviii KANT'S UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY 



Kant's philosophy. It combines all the parts of his 

 system into unity ; it enables us to distinguish the 

 essential from the accidental in his development and 

 expression ; and it furnishes the criterion by which 

 his place is to be determined as the founder of a 

 new period in the philosophical and scientific history 

 of the world. So large is Kant's system of thought, 

 when looked at from the scientific point of view, and 

 so completely does it still furnish a framework into 

 which the whole scientific knowledge of our time may 

 be methodically set. 



9. The Ultimate Problem left Unsolved by Kant. 

 It could not escape the penetrating mind of Kant that, 

 with all the comprehensiveness of his fundamental 

 point of view, there yet lay questions and problems 

 behind and beyond it. The?' Chaos' from which he 

 starts is not in itself intuitively intelligible, nor is it 

 an absolute ultimate ; it is only a relative ultimate to 

 the existing system of things. It comes in ' in the 

 middle of a process,' when the actual matter of the 

 universe is found at its widest diffusion, and in a 

 heterogeneous state, making space to be what Lockyer 

 calls ' a meteoritic plenum/ the prius only of the 

 existing order. Kant represents this Chaos as exist- 

 ing really but for a moment, as having come out of a 

 prior condition of things, and as having already 

 actually in it the forces of attraction and repulsion 

 which, acting under their own special laws, begin 

 at once to reduce it to a new order, and to maintain 

 / it in that order. Here Kant revives the ancient idea, 



