
KANT AND HVOLUTION 595 
in proportion to the cube.’® Kant seeks, by reasonings both obscure 
and peculiar, to establish an @ priori necessity that these two forces— 
emanating from identical points and perfectly analogous save in the 
direction of the motion of the external particles they affect—should 
yet differ in the ratio in which their potency decreases with distance. 
But in the “ Universal Natural History ” the disciple of Newton bases 
no calculations, such as could be compared with the actual positions 
and densities of the heavenly bodies, upon this quantitative formula— 
of which, possibly, he had not yet bethought himself. In fact, in his 
cosmogony he wholly fails to indicate even an approximate law of the 
action of repulsive force. When the plot of the world-story threatens 
to come to a standstill or to issue in a hopeless entanglement, “ repul- 
sion” like a deus ex machina appears upon the scene to set things right 
and ensure a happy ending. Precisely the same particles, under what 
(so far as one can judge from Kant’s language) might be similar phys- 
ical conditions, and at approximately equal distances, figure now as 
attracting, now as repelling, one another, as the exigencies of the 
hypothesis require. That a theorist who improvised laws of dynamics 
in so easy-going a manner proves to have anticipated a very recent 
conception of planetary evolution, must, I think, be regarded rather as 
evidence of good luck than of scientific good management. 
What, now, was, for Kant himself, the bearing of his doctrine of 
cosmic evolution upon biology? Descartes, holding the theory of animal 
automatism, had undoubtedly regarded the formation of organisms as 
part of that mechanical process of the redistribution of matter which 
also explained the formation of suns and planets. Such a view was not 
necessarily equivalent to a belief in the transformation of species. 
There is no necessary logical connection (though there is a natural 
affinity) between a mechanistic physiology and transformism—any 
more than between a vitalistic physiology and the doctrine of the fixity 
of species. Thus the question concerning the relation of cosmic evo- 
lutionism to biology is merely the genetic form of the issue of vitalism 
versus mechanism ; in it the problems of the theory of descent need not 
be directly implicated. Upon this question a view current in Kant’s 
time was that the gradual genesis of inorganic things might well be ex- 
* Kant’s conception of “ repulsive force” is used by him in the “ Physical 
Monadology ” primarily to explain the impenetrability of bodies (for which he 
supposes that a special force must be posited). But it is not identical with 
impenetrability; it is explicitly represented by him as a force acting in distans. 
In the “ Universal Natural History ” it is rather to the phenomena of solutions 
and the expansion of gases that Kant points as empirical evidence of the exist- 
ence of such a force. Newton (“ Optics,” Bk. IIT., Q. 31) had made a like infer- 
ence from the same phenomena; but he did not write, as Kant did, seventeen 
years after D. Bernouilli had propounded the kinetic theory of gases. And it is 
impossible to imagine Newton deducing a cosmogony by the use of a conception 
so loose and quantitatively indefinite as is Kant’s conception of repulsive force 
in the “ Universal Natural History.” 
