1 74 DIETERICH S SUMMARY OF KANT S THEORY. 



bodies, will likewise draw after them its destruction of 

 necessity. But, on the other hand, it is also probable 

 that there will lie a seed of renovation in the crash and 

 chaos of shattered worlds. 



According to the analogy of all other forms of production 

 in external nature, which consist of a continual change 

 between the combination and separation of constant ele- 

 ments, every cosmic system as well as every smaller 

 formation which the universal mechanism produces will 

 complete its course at some one point of time, just as it 

 began it in time. When a world has developed its original 

 capacities and exhausted its inner store of energy, it can 

 then only play the last part in the drama of its changes 

 namely, pay its debt to mortality. But because every 

 world hastens to its destruction with a tendency, founded 

 indubitably in mechanical laws, and therefore already 

 designated by Newton as thoroughly natural and inevitable, 

 it is to be expected that nature in her boundless fruitful- 

 ness, which is everywhere observable, will make up for 

 any ending in one place of the universe by a compensation 

 at another, and will continually maintain herself scatheless 

 by innumerable new productions through the whole extent 

 of her economy. We observe, moreover, that nature goes 

 with extraordinary prodigality to work in her productions, 

 and that she continually disseminates a superfluity of 

 seeds and germs. This, her way of counting with large 

 numbers and carrying on her housekeeping in the grand 

 style, will surely also find expression in the development 

 of the whole universe. As she destroys without scruple 

 small creatures, and higher or lower ones in the same 

 manner, because their production costs her nothing, so 

 she regards a world or a Milky Way of worlds not other- 

 wise than a flower or an insect, because the infinitude of 

 the creation is great enough to let even them disappear 

 again from the scene. The transitoriness of the greatest 

 world-systems, which are all swallowed up by the abyss 

 of the eternities, thus furnishes us with a weighty reason 

 for supposing that the whole creation extends to infinity 

 in time and space, as soon as we have recourse to the 

 analogy of the usual procedure of nature that is accessible 

 to our immediate experience. 



Thus then there presses itself immediately upon our fancy 



