48 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



i 

 down to the polyp, and from this even to the mosses and lichens, and, finally, 



down to the lowest stage of nature known to us, namely, to crude matter; from 

 which matter and its forces, according to mechanical laws, . . . the entire 

 system of nature (which in organized beings is to us so incomprehensible that 

 we feel constrained to think another principle for it) seems to descend. 87 



Here it remains open to the archeologist of nature to derive from the sur- 

 viving traces of her earliest revolutions, according to any natural mechanism 

 known to him or conjectured by him, the whole of that great family of creatures' 

 (for so we should have (miisste) to think of it, if the above-mentioned rela- 

 tionship is to have any ground). He can suppose the womb of Mother Earth 

 ... to have given birth at first to creatures of less purposive form; these in 

 turn to have brought forth others (diese wiederum andere [Oeschopfe] gebdrert 

 lassen) better adapted to the places where they originated and to their rela- 

 tions with one another; until finally Nature's womb, grown torpid and ossified, 

 produced only species that underwent no further modifications; so that the 

 number of species from that time forward remained just what it was at the 

 moment when Nature's potency in the production of forms reached its end. 

 Only, he must still in the end ascribe to this universal mother an organization 

 purposively predisposed for the production of all these creatures. Otherwise the 

 purposiveness of form characteristic of the products of the animal and vegetable 

 kingdoms would be inconceivable. 



Now this passage, though it painstakingly avoids all positive affir- 

 mation, doubtless sounds as if Kant intended by it, if not to indicate 

 his own conversion to transformism, at least to issue to others a dis- 

 pensation to embrace that doctrine. But the following note, attached to 

 the end of the second paragraph, puts a different face upon the matter : 



We may call a hypothesis of this kind a daring adventure (ein gewagtes 

 Abenteuer) of the reason; there are doubtless few investigators of Nature, even 

 of the most acute minds, to whom the hypothesis has not at times presented 

 itself. For absurd it is not — in the sense in which generatio cequivoca — the 

 production of an organized being through the mechanism of crude, inorganic 

 matter — is absurd. It would after all be a case of generatio unwoca, in the 

 most general sense of the word, since the hypothesis supposes that every organ- 

 ism is derived from another organism, though the one may differ from the other 

 in species; as if, for example, certain water-animals transformed themselves 

 little by little into marsh-animals and these in turn, after some generations, 

 into land-animals. A priori, in the judgment of reason alone, there is nothing 

 self-contradictory in this. Only, experience shows no example of such a thing. 

 According to experience, all generation is not only generatio univoca (in con- 

 trast with generation of the organic out of the inorganic ) , but also generatio 

 homonima, in which the parent produces progeny having the same organization 

 as itself. Generatio heteronima [i. e., transformation of species], so far as our 

 knowledge of Nature through experience reaches, is nowhere found. 



This is certainly not the language of a believer, still less that of an 

 advocate. True, Kant's position has significantly changed since two 

 years previous. He has at last fairly discriminated the question con- 

 cerning transformation from that concerning equivocal generation, and 



37 The entire hypothesis mentioned down to this point, it will presently 

 appear, Kant really rejects as not only untrue but absurd. For it is a hypoth- 

 esis implying " equivocal generation " and the reducibility of organic processes 

 to mechanical laws. 



