IDEALISM IN GERMANY 



the various sciences, which aggravated the dif- 

 ficulties arising from insufficient experience and 

 from the undeveloped state of human control over 

 society and nature. 



Under these circumstances, a similar "fate be- 

 fell a work, which in our day ranks high in the 

 literature of evolution Kant's " Natural His- 

 tory and Theory of the Heavens," published in 

 1755, the year of the great earthquake, which 

 in five minutes destroyed the city of Lisbon and 

 killed 60,000 people. Hardly anyone took no- 

 tice of the ideas advanced in this work, until 

 Laplace, in 1799, published his " Mecanique 

 Celeste" and furnished the mathematical proof 

 for the Kantian hypotheses. Yet Kant's work 

 was the most revolutionary, and, from the stand- 

 point of materialist monism, most epoch-making 

 publication since the time of Demokritos. In it 

 the Konigsberg philosopher undertook to treat 

 of the " constitution and the mechanical origin 

 of the entire universe on the basis of Newtonian 

 principles." He proceeded to demonstrate that 

 the sun and its system had developed mechanically 

 by a rotation of a primitive nebular substance 

 filling universal space, and thus established a 

 theory, which has maintained itself up to the 

 present day. Only in the beginning of the 2Oth 



73 



