42 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



transformation. It is primarily in the name of a pseudo-axiom of 

 scholasticism that he pronounces for the fixity of species ! But in 

 reality, as his expressions show, it was because of certain tempera- 

 mental peculiarities of his mind — a mind with a deep scholastic strain 

 of its own, one that could not quite endure the notion of a nature all 

 fluent and promiscuous and confused, in which series of organisms are 

 to an indefinite degree capable of losing one set of characters and 

 assuming another set. He craved, after all, a universe sharply cate- 

 gorized and classified and tied up in orderly parcels. And thus, though 

 he had learned from the newer scientific tendencies of his time that 

 the business of science is with processes, and especially with genetic 

 processes, this scholastic side of his mind prevented him from making 

 any thorough application of the principle to biology. He was prepared 

 to go a considerable distance upon the path of evolutionism — but to 

 admit that organisms (always to Kant, because of their " teleological " 

 character, forming in nature a realm apart) were so far plastic that the 

 very archetypal traits of species could, under the play of ordinary, 

 environmental agencies, be altered past recognition — that was too much ! 



Meanwhile, it must be remembered that he was already committed 

 to the admission of a large measure of modification within the species. 

 But if it were so incredible a thing that the "original form" of a 

 species should be radically altered, why was it not equally incredible 

 that black men should be descendants of white men ? Why did not the 

 arguments against the transformation of one species into another species 

 apply equally to the transformation of one race into another race? 

 Why should one who supposed — as Kant supposed — that the wolf or 

 hyena may have developed into the extraordinarily diversified breeds 

 of our domestic dogs, have found it an intolerable paradox to suppose 

 that the horse may have developed into the donkey, or both from a 

 common ancestor ? To such questions as these Kant's theory concern- 

 ing the causes of the origination of races was called upon to provide 

 an answer. The answer has an appearance of great simplicity: Kant 

 merely said that in reality races had no characters vrtiich were not 

 present, but latent, in their species from the start. In other words, 

 he escapes the difficulties of his position by the easy artifice of a 

 hypothesis of preformations. Nothing has been added to or taken 

 from the germ-plasm of the species " man " since the beginning ; the 

 reproductive faculty merely contained in itself always certain alterna- 

 tive potencies — especially with respect to the production of skin-color — 

 one or another of which was called into play in accordance with varia- 

 tions of external circumstances. 



Any character that was to be transmissible (was sich fortpflanzen soil) 

 must have already lain beforehand in the reproductive faculty, predetermined 

 to develop at the proper occasion, in conformity with the circumstances amid 

 which the animal might find itself and in which it would be obliged to main- 

 tain itself. . . . This precaution of Nature to equip all her creatures for all 



