46 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



reviewing the book, therefore, Kant was naturally led to touch upon 

 the subject of organic evolution. The passage runs as follows : 



As for the graded scale (Stufenleiter) of organisms, one can not so severely 

 reproach the author because it will not consent to extend far enough to match 

 those conceptions of his which reach far beyond the limits of this world. For 

 the use of it even in relation to the kingdom of nature here on earth likewise 

 leads to nothing. The slightness of the degrees of difference between species is, 

 since the number of species is so great, a necessary consequence of their number. 

 But a relationship between them — such that one species should originate from 

 another and all from one original species, or that all should spring from the 

 teeming womb of a universal Mother — this would lead to ideas so monstrous 

 that the reason shrinks from before them with a shudder. Such ideas can not 

 with justice be imputed to our author. 



It is surely one of the humorous incidents in the history of science 

 that more than one grave historian should have found, in the writings 

 of this very period when Kant repudiated evolutionism with the tremu- 

 lous emotion of a child frightened by a hobgoblin, the idea of evolution 

 playing " the same role as in contemporary science." 



5. The Essay " On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philos- 

 ophy." — To the title of this article, published in 1788, the contents do 

 not altogether closely correspond. 34 Part of it is, indeed, a prelude to 

 the examination of the conception of purposiveness in nature given 

 two years later in the " Kritik of Judgment " ; but a greater part con- 

 sists in a defence of the theories of his two papers on the idea of race 

 against certain critics. For the purposes of the present inquiry those 

 theories have already been sufficiently expounded. But it is worth 

 while noting that, in the case of one of his critics, Forster, Kant sup- 

 posed himself to be confronted with a definite evolutionary theory, upon 

 which he felt obliged to pass judgment. The articles of what Kant 

 understood to be Forster's " system " were these : 



The earth in travail, giving birth to animals and plants from her pregnant 

 womb, fertilized by the sea-slime ; a consequent multiplicity of local originations 

 of organic species, Africa having its own separate species of men (the negroes), 

 Asia another, and so on; as a deduction from these assumptions, the relation- 

 ship of all organic species in an imperceptibly graded series, from man to the 

 whale, and so backward ( con jectur ally even to the lichens and mosses) — and a 

 relationship not of similarity merely, but of actual derivation from a common 

 stock. 36 



34 There is a reference to the species question in a fragment in the " Lose 

 Blatter" (I., 137 f. ), assigned by Reicke to 1787. This is probably merely a 

 draft for part of the essay here considered. The fragment is in the usual vein; 

 Kant speaks in it, for example, of " the inconceivable constancy of species, in 

 the midst of so many causes affecting them and modifying their development." 



85 Kant's language clearly seems to ascribe these ideas to Forster, but quite 

 without justification from anything in Forster's article. So far from fathering 

 this system, Forster mentions it as an example of an over-ambitious hypothesis, 

 beyond the reach of verification by man, and therefore beyond the limits of true 

 science ("Teutsche Merkur," 1786, pp. 57-86, 150-166). And in his " Kleine 





