cviii KANT'S UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY 



'voyaging for ever through strange seas of thought 

 alone.' Herein he laid the deepest and broadest 

 basis for modern science that it has yet received, 

 and it still stretches to the ever-widening horizon of 

 man's knowledge of all Nature. It must be per- 

 manently associated with the continued progress 

 of physical science hereafter, the surest guarantee 

 of its perpetuity. But while recognising all this, I 

 do not join in the regret of some recent scientific 

 writers, hinted even by Helmholtz, that Kant should 

 have ever left the domain of physical science to soar 

 in the higher ether of pure speculative thought. This 

 further movement was inevitable to him, and would 

 have been taken, probably with other results, even 

 without the awakening touch of David Hume. * Nihil 

 tetigit quod non ornavit.' Yet I am convinced that 

 the Critique of Pure Reason would have been more 

 truly scientific, more satisfying, and more lasting 

 if not more original and stimulating had Kant 

 kept in its prosecution more faithfully to the 

 fundamental positions of his early scientific work. 

 Absorbed in the forms of his own subjective per- 

 ception and reflection, he shut out for the moment 

 the great universe beyond, which gives them their 

 true meaning and purpose, separating himself by a 

 false abstraction from it, till the infinite space and 

 time through which, in his youthful ardour, he had 

 ranged with such freedom and power, shrank from 

 their immensity and reality into the mere spectral 

 phantoms of his own subjectivity. And so he became 



