44 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



clearly perceived this implication ; but in his essay " On the Use of 

 Teleological Principles in Philosophy," 1788, he expressly draws the 

 inference. 



As for what are called varieties in the human species, I remark only that 

 in respect to these, as well as to the racial characters, nature must be conceived, 

 not as producing forms with entire freedom, but as merely developing forms in 

 a way predetermined by original predispositions {Anlagen) . For varieties (as 

 well as races) show purposiveness and adaptation, and therefore can not be the 

 work of chance, . . . The varieties among men of the same race were in all 

 probability no less purposively implanted in the original stock (Stamm), in 

 order to make possible the utmost diversity for the sake of endlessly various 

 ends, than were the differences of race, in order to assure adaptation to fewer 

 but more important ends. . . . There is, however, this difference, that the racial 

 Anlagen, once they had developed — which must have already happened in the 

 earliest period — no longer produced any new forms, nor yet permitted the old 

 ones to become extinguished; while the Anlagen of varieties — at least so far as 

 our knowledge goes — seem to indicate a nature inexhaustibly productive of new 

 characters, both inner and outer. 



It is a conventional practise, especially among German writers on 

 philosophy, to speak in a tone of reverent admiration of Kant's pro- 

 found insight into the spirit and methods of empirical science. The 

 reader, therefore, will do well to note the precise logical character of 

 Kant's procedure in framing and supporting these hypotheses, which 

 constitute his special contribution to biology. In the first place, he 

 assumes, with no evidence at all, that two species incapable of pro- 

 ducing fertile offspring when mated, thereby testify that they can have 

 had no common ancestors. He thus, with a single dogmatic phrase, 

 " there can be only one cause of this " infertility, begs the entire 

 question of the transformation of species, which had been already raised 

 in his time by writers of the first eminence, whose work was well known 

 to him. Further, in order to reconcile his doctrine of the impossibility 

 of any real modification of nature's " original model " for each species 

 with his doctrine of the descent of widely divergent races and varieties 

 from a single species, he invented the hypothesis of the latent pre- 

 existence of " germs " anticipatory of the subsequent changes of milieu 

 which the species was to undergo, and destined to take command of the 

 reproductive process when the proper occasions arrive, while the other 

 germs obligingly retire into inactivity.'^ This, which remained to the 

 end of his days one of Kant's most cherished notions, had most of 

 the faults of which a scientific hypothesis is capable; and it had not 

 even the ambiguous merit of serving the purpose for which it was 

 designed. It was intended as a support to the anti-evolutionistic 

 dogma which Kant had made his own: "every natural kind remains 

 true to its original nature " ; yet it was admittedly consistent with an 



"Cf. "On the Use of Teleological Principles": "Wherever the ancestors 

 of a race accidentally came and persisted, there was developed the germ latent 

 in their organization with special reference to that neighborhood (Erdgegend) 

 and capable of adapting them to that climate." 



