DIETERICH'S SUMMARY OF KANT'S THEORY. 171 



atoms brings about an harmonious constitution of the uni- 

 verse, the atoms must be ruled by an inner tendency to 

 the most perfect organization possible; and this finds its 

 most satisfying explanation in their common origin from 

 the Being of the Deity. Moreover, because the mechanical 

 evolution of nature produces rational products, it must be 

 internally animated by a plan of creation, thought out on 

 the great scale. And this thought of a Divine Reason 

 indwelling in the logical mechanism of the simple material 

 forces, leads to a sublimer idea of the Deity, to a more 

 worthy representation of nature as the work of its Creator's 

 power, and to a more living inward perception of the 

 relationship between God and nature than the view that 

 nature is, as it were, an adverse subject which must first 

 be forced by external compulsion into obedience to the 

 commands of reason. 



Taken in the way of the causal explanation of nature, as 

 well as of the religious contemplation of the world advo- 

 cated by Newton, and supported on the weighty founda- 

 tions of experience, the hypothesis of a mechanical origin 

 of the System of the Planets and Fixed Stars may cherish 

 the hope of a favourable issue and reception. It is con- 

 structed very happily in detail. All that is gratuitously 

 presupposed is only this, that the matter out of which the 

 present heavenly bodies consist was at one time decom- 

 posed into its elements and dispersed through infinite 

 space, and that the material elements existing in such a 

 state of dispersion showed certain differences in respect 

 of their gravity. It is in some measure an undecided 

 question as to whether this chaos of the minutest particles 

 of matter should be represented as at rest or in motion, 

 in that supposed initial state. In his Natural History of 

 the Heavens Kant speaks occasionally of an initial state 

 of rest, in attachment to the thoughts expressed in his 

 first publication. Afterwards in 1785 he assumes a first 

 motion of the atoms in space, but renounces the attempt 

 to give it any further derivation. 



To the elements of matter there are to be ascribed, as 

 original forces, the Forces of Attraction and Repulsion, 

 which have been universally recognized since Newton and 

 certainly established. By the operation of these simple 

 fundamental forces motion comes into the chaos, and the 



