KANT AND EVOLUTION 545 
also the favorable views already taken of that precedent by writers of 
recognized respectability. 
Moreover, as the passage just cited indicates, Descartes was not the 
only, though he was the most eminent, predecessor of Kant to set an 
example of an undertaking similar to that upon which Kant was enter- 
ing. Hypotheses about the origin of the world or of our planet may 
be said to have been especially in fashion during the late seventeenth 
and early eighteenth century. In the words of Cuvier,** 
The end of the seventeenth century saw the birth of a new science, which 
took in its infancy the high-sounding name of “ Theory of the Earth.” Starting 
from a small number of facts badly observed, connecting them by fantastic sup- 
positions, it professed to go back to the origin of worlds, to, as it were, play 
with them, and to create their history. 
The “ Theoria Telluris Sacra,” 1681, 1689, and the “ Archeologize 
Philosophicer,” 1692, of Thomas Burnet, and the “ New Theory of the 
Earth,” 1696, of William Whiston—successor to Newton’s professor- 
ship at Cambridge, effective popularizer of the Newtonian doctrines, 
and the supposed original of Goldsmith’s “ Dr. Primrose ”—were based 
upon an incongruous mixture of scientific and scriptural considerations ; 
but they at least made cosmogony a topic of general interest. As much, 
if little more, can be said of Woodward’s “ Essay toward a Natural 
History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies,” 1695. But in 1734 there 
was published at Leipsic a treatise which resembled Laplace’s theory 
much more nearly than did Kant’s. The “ Principia rerum natu- 
ralium ” of Swedenborg—already celebrated as a geologist and metal- 
lurgist, not yet celebrated as a mystic and religious reformer—enunci- 
ated the following theses :!? 
That the sun is the center of a vortex; that it rotates upon its axis; that 
the solar matter concentrated itself into a belt or zone or ring at the equator, 
or rather at the ecliptic; that by the attenuation of the ring it became dis- 
rupted; that upon the disruption, parts of the matter collected into globes; ... 
that the globes of solar matter were projected into space; ... that in propor- 
tion as the igneous matter thus projected receded from the sun it gradually 
experienced refrigeration and consequent condensation; that hence followed the 
formation of the elements of ether, air, aqueous vapor, etc., until the planets 
finally reached their present orbit; that during this period the earth experienced 
a succession of geological changes which originated all the varieties in the 
mineral kingdom, and laid, as it were, the basis of the vegetable and afterwards 
of the animal kingdoms. 
The idea of planetary evolution was thus anything but a novelty in 
1755. What is more, the decade immediately preceding the completion 
of Kant’s “ Allgemeine Naturgeschichte” may be said to have been 
especially distinguished by the prominence with which, during it, ques- 
tions of cosmogony were brought to the attention of the learned world. 
=“ Eloge de Werner,” cited in Packard’s “ Lamarck,” p. 92. 
“TI borrow the summary of Clissold, from his introduction to the English 
translation of Swedenborg’s “ Principia,” 1846. 
