KANT AND EVOLUTION 49 



has learned that the admission of a common descent of different or- 

 ganic species is not necessarily inconsistent either with his hypothesis 

 of "purposive predispositions" or with those doctrines of the com- 

 pletely teleological character of organisms, and of their independence of 

 all merely external causes of modification, which that hypothesis was 

 designed to safeguard. He no longer condemns transformism on a 

 priori grounds as a philosophical monstrosity. Its truth or falsity 

 becomes a question to be settled by empirical evidence. But he also ap- 

 pears to say as plainly as possible that all the known empirical evidence 

 is against the theory. No contemporary of Kanf s, reading this pas- 

 sage in the " Kritik of Judgment " as a whole, was likely to find in it 

 encouragement to risk that " bold adventure of the reason " of which it 

 speaks. Moreover, in the next section of the " Kritik of Judgment " 

 (§81) Kant, in discussing various embryological hypotheses, unmis- 

 takably gives his own endorsement to the opinion that " the Supreme 

 Cause of the world . . . would, in the original products of its wisdom, 

 have supplied merely the predispositions by which an organic being 

 produces another of like kind and the species perpetually maintains 

 itself." Throughout the remarks upon embryology contained in this 

 section Kant seems to take the constancy of specific forms for granted.'* 



The chief topic of this second or biological part of the " Kritik of 

 Judgment" is, of course, that question which had been present to 

 Kant's mind ever since his adoption of a theory of the evolution of the 

 inorganic world " according to mechanical laws." Could organisms also 

 be mechanistically "explained," or only teleologically ? It would re- 

 quire too much space to set forth and discuss adequately Kanf s ex- 

 tremely diverse utterances on this question in his last important 

 treatise. But when all those utterances are considered together, they 

 do not seem to indicate any essential departure from the position which 

 we have found him all along maintaining. It is true that he now in- 

 sists with the utmost emphasis that without the conception of mechan- 

 ism there is no such thing as science. " It is infinitely important for 

 reason, in its explanation of Nature's processes of production . . . not 

 to pass beyond the mechanism of Nature" (§ 78). He even declares 

 that "apart from causality according to mechanical laws organisms 

 would not be products of Nature at all " (§81). But he also continues 

 with equal emphasis to insist that "absolutely no human reason (in 



" Brock in commenting upon § 80 of the " Kritik of Judgment " observes 

 that Kant takes cognizance directly only of the hypothesis of saltatory muta- 

 tion, and is silent concerning the possibility of transformation through the 

 summation of slight individual variations. This remark seems to me scarcely 

 justified by Kant's language. By generatio heteronitna he means the change of 

 one species "little by little" (nach und nach) into another; though he evi- 

 dently had only vague ideas of the rate at which, and the mode in which, this 

 change might be supposed by the partisans of transformism to take place. (Cf. 

 Brock in Biol. Centralblatt, Bd. 8, p. 644.) 



vol.. Lixvin. — 4. 



