36 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



KANT AND EVOLUTION 



By Pbofessoe ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY 



THE JOHNS HOPKINS TJNIVEESITT 



II 



;T N the previous part of this article we have examined two of Kant's 

 -*- early writings, and have found in the one a confused mechanistic 

 theory of cosmic evolution, and in the other a sort of anthropological 

 and social evolutionism — neither doctrine being truly original with 

 Kant himself. But we have discovered no traces of biological evo- 

 lutionism, in the sense either of an admission of the possibility of the 

 production of the organic out of the inorganic by natural processes, or 

 in the sense of an assertion of the mutability of species. In the writings 

 next to be considered we shall find Kant brought directly into the pres- 

 ence of the more fundamental questions of theoretical biology. 



3. The Two Essays on the Conception of "Race" 1775, 1785.— The 

 review of Moscati (1771), summarized in the preceding instalment of 

 this survey, was the earliest indication among Kant's writings of a 

 growing interest in a group of scientific problems which always there- 

 after much occupied his attention: namely, the genetic problems of 

 physical anthropology. The beginnings of that science, in its syste- 

 matic form, are usually credited to the treatise of Blumenbach, " De 

 generis humani variatione nativa," 1775. Blumenbach, says the his- 

 torian 21 of eighteenth century anthropology, " derived his zoological 

 facts chiefly from Buffon. His philosophy, and in particular his funda- 

 mental conception of man's place in nature, were founded on the sys- 

 tem of Leibniz. The opening sections of his book at once show his 

 principal preoccupations in the inquiry — viz., to establish the limits, 

 on the one hand, between man and the animals, and, on the other hand, 

 between the different races of men. These two remained the chief 

 themes of anthropology throughout the succeeding period." It was to 

 the second of these themes that Kant especially addressed himself. His 

 first discussion of it appeared in the same year as Blumenbach's treatise. 

 In the " preliminary announcement " to his " Lectures on Physical 

 Geography," delivered in the summer semester of 1775, Kant took for 

 his topic " The Different Baces of Men "; 22 he reverted to the subject in 

 an article in the Berliner Monatsschrift for November, 1785, entitled 



21 Giinther, " Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen im 18ten Jahrhundert," p. 287. 



22 " Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen." This writing will here be 

 referred to as the " Physical Geography." It is to be found in Hartenstein's 

 edition, 1867, II., 433. 



