KANT AND EVOLUTION 51 



not, on the occasion of some great revolutions of nature, be followed by a third 

 — an epoch in which an orang-outang or a chimpanzee should perfect the organs 

 which serve for walking, touching, speaking, into the articulated structure of a 

 human being, with a central organ for the use of the understanding, and should 

 gradually develop itself through social culture. 



Only to a superficial reading can this passage exhibit Kant in the 

 guise of an evolutionist in biology. For, in the first place, there is no 

 indication that he conceives even these extensive modifications of form 

 and function as transforming the animals of which he speaks into 

 new " natural " species, in his own sense of that term. In the second 

 place, the passage does not suggest that the existing human species is 

 descended from the apes. For in the " second epoch " mentioned, we 

 already find our human ancestors living the household life; and the 

 "third epoch," characterized by such striking improvements in the 

 orang-outang and the chimpanzee, is subsequent to the second, and, in 

 fact, still in the future.'* Finally, even to this hopeful anticipation of 

 a " good time coming " for the apes at some future " revolution of na- 

 ture," Kant does not really subscribe ; he merely expresses some passing 

 wonder whether something of the sort " might not " occur. As a matter 

 of fact, his publication of so vague and inept a passage as this after 

 Maupertuis, Buffon, Diderot, Erasmus Darwin and Goethe*** had 

 written, shows that in his declining years he had not lost that consti- 

 tutional aversion from the proper hypothesis of organic evolution which 

 we have found to be characteristic of him from the beginning of his 

 career. Also from the beginning, it is true, we have seen in him, as 

 we see here, a constant vague inclination towards evolutionistic modes 

 of thought. But through all that half-century, which constituted the 

 period of the true beginnings of biological evolutionism Kant, our 

 analysis has shown, never once professed belief in the transf ormist ; nor 

 did he ever show an ability to apprehend clearly either the precise 

 meaning or the force of the considerations which could even then be 

 adduced in favor of that doctrine. 



•• Only by disregarding the natural construction of Kant's language can the 

 sentence about the " third epoch " be interpreted as referring to past time. 

 Wallace (from whose skilful rendering of the passage I have borrowed some 

 phrases) asks: "Has Kant cautiously put the future instead of the past, and 

 hinted at what probably has been rather than what may one day be? " (" Kant," 

 p. 115.) But why should Kant in 1798 have felt obliged to hint so obliquely 

 at an idea familiar to his contemporaries for half a century, which Buffon had 

 hinted at a good deal more plainly, and several celebrated writers had adopted? 

 The desire to avoid theological opprobrium could hardly have been a motive for 

 taking so evasive and misleading a way of imparting his real view. For theolog- 

 ical opprobrium was as likely to attach to certain opinions which he frankly 

 accepted — and probably to the hypothesis of the future transformation of apes 

 into rational beings — as to the hypothesis of their past transformation. 



*• Goethe's first unequivocally evolutionary utterance seems to be found in 

 his " VortrSge Qber die . . . allgemeine Einleitung in die vergleichende Anat- 

 omie," 1796. Cf. Wasielewski, " Gfoethe und die Deaeendenzlehre," p. 27. 



