542 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
one of his university teachers, Knutzen, professor of logic and meta- 
physics at Koenigsberg, who was at once an ardent Pietist, an ardent 
Wolffian, and an ardent Newtonian. All of the earliest three consid- 
erable writings® of Kant may be said to be chiefly attempts to give new 
applications to Newton’s principles, or to supply his omissions, or to do 
both at once. Of these three, the treatise with which we are here con- 
cerned, the “ Allgemeine Naturgeschichte” of 1755, was an endeavor 
to fill up two of the most obvious gaps (from the cosmical system- 
maker’s point of view) which the author of the “ Principia” had left. 
It required no great originality and no stroke of genius on Kant’s part 
to recognize these gaps and to devise the general outlines of the hypoth- 
eses by which he tried to fill them. The problems, and in one of the two 
cases at least, the proposed solution even in most of its details, were 
present in the scientific atmosphere of the period as epidemic infec- 
tions. 
The first of these gaps, and the one less pertinent to our present 
topic, lay in Newton’s failure to suggest even a conjectural hypothesis 
concerning the systematic arrangement of the heavenly bodies beyond 
the boundaries of our system. To three of his disciples at almost the 
same time’—but to the two others at an earlier date than to Kant—it 
occurred as a “ probable,” though perhaps not strictly verifiable, suppo- 
sition that our group of planets with its central sun is only a part of an 
analogous but larger concentric system of revolving bodies, or of similar 
groups of bodies, constituting the Milky Way; and that this in turn is 
but part of a single, universal system, all the members of which are 
similarly arranged with respect to one another, and revolve about a 
body at the center of gravitation of the entire universe in accordance 
with Newton’s laws. The hypothesis had, of course, an attractive com- 
bination of grandiosity and simplicity; and it was natural enough to 
inquire whether or not it were true. But it was, I suppose, essentially 
incapable of any serious testing by any data then in the possession of 
astronomers. It is apparently only within the past five years that some 
light has been thrown upon the problem of a possible “systematic ar- 
rangement” of the fixed stars ;* and the arrangement which recent re- 
6 On the True Mode of Estimating Vis Viva,” 1747; “ Universal Natural 
History and Theory of the Heavens,” 1755; “ Physical Monadology,” 1756. 
7™To Thomas Wright, of Durham, before 1750; to Lambert, 1749; and to 
Kant. Wright’s “ Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe, founded 
upon the Laws of Nature and solving by Mathematical Principles the General 
Phenomena of the Visible Creation,” London, 1750, was known to Kant through 
a summary in the Hamburg Freie Urteile, 1751, and is referred to by him in 
the “ Allgemeine Naturgeschichte.” Lambert’s “ Kosmologische Briefe” were 
not published until 1761, but were planned and partly written in 1749, as Lam- 
bert declares in a letter to Kant, November 13, 1765. 
® See the article of Eddington on “Star-Streams,” in Scientia, VIIL., 1910, 
p. 40. 
