KANT AND EVOLUTION 45 



immense and indefinable degree of divergence, on the part of the 

 descendants of a given pair, from the characters of their ancestors. 

 As Kant himself observed, it assigned many of the species of the 

 systematists to a common descent. But if the " reproductive faculty " 

 of the primeval wolf was — as Kant grants that it may have been — 

 capacious enough to contain special " germs " for the subsequent pro- 

 duction, not only of wolves, but also of jackals, pug-dogs, greyhounds, 

 dachshunds, hyenas and bull-dogs, there appeared to be no adequate 

 reason for assigning any particular limit to the original capacity, and 

 the consequent eventual versatility, of that faculty in any organism 

 whatever. It was entirely open to Kant, without abandoning his theory 

 of anticipatory germs, to regard the wolf in turn as the development of 

 a germ implanted in still earlier ancestors, which the wolf and his 

 diverse present progeny share in common with a group of organisms 

 still more various; and so on ad indefinitum. Since the immutability 

 of " nature's original model " was to be sufficiently salved by the simple 

 device of supposing that model to have virtually contained within itself, 

 and in course of time, under changing external conditions, to have 

 extruded from itself, a vast assortment of other extremely dissimilar 

 models, there was nothing in the most thorough-going theory of the 

 transformation of species which could be inconsistent with an immuta- 

 bility of so elusive and so elastic a character. Kant's rejection of 

 evolutionism was thus not justified even by those singular embryolog- 

 ical speculations into which his desire to reject that theory seduced him. 



4. The Review of Herder's "Ideen." — In 1785 Kant published a 

 review of Herder's " Ideen zu einer Philosophic der Geschichte der 

 Menschheit." Herder, as I have elsewhere shown, 33 was not a believer 

 in the transformation of species; but he may perhaps be without 

 exaggeration described as a near-evolutionist. He set forth in the 

 " Ideen " the theory of a gradual production of organisms in an 

 ascending series in which little by little the form and powers of man 

 were approximated. Through all this " graded scale of beings " was 

 conspicuous that " unity of type " which the work of Daubenton and 

 Buffon in comparative anatomy had brought to light. The successive 

 emergence of ever higher forms Herder ascribed to some innate potency 

 in " nature " tending to progress and to the constant increase and 

 diversification of life. Just how he conceived this to operate in the 

 actual formation of organisms it seems impossible to make out; one is 

 obliged to doubt whether he ever framed any definite ideas on the sub- 

 ject. But on the unity, yet inexhaustible diversity, of nature's pro- 

 ductive power, and on the strange way in which, as he supposed, all 

 animals and plants, and perhaps even snow-flakes and other inorganic 

 things, are fashioned after a single archetype of form, Herder had 

 much to say that was eloquent and impressive, if not very clear. In 



w Poptjlab Science Monthly, August, 1904, p. 327. 



