KANT AND EVOLUTION 553 
Kant wrote a review of a disquisition by an Italian anatomist, Moscati,”° 
on the difference between the structure of man and that of the lower 
animals. Moscati’s principal contention was that the upright posture 
is not “natural” to man, and was not his primitive attitude. Upon 
this Kant remarks in part as follows: 
Here we have once more the natural man upon all fours—an acute anat- 
omist having traced him back to that condition. Dr. Moscati shows that the 
upright gait of man is forced and contrary to nature, and that his structure is 
such that this position, when it has become necessary and habitual, entails upon 
man various disorders and diseases—clear proof enough that he has been led by 
reason and imitation to depart from his primitive animal posture. In his inner 
constitution man is not formed otherwise than as are all the quadrupeds.... 
Paradoxical as this conclusion of our Italian physician may seem, yet in the 
hands of so acute and philosophical an anatomist it attains to almost complete 
certainty (erhdlt er beinahe eine viéllige Gewissheit). We see from this that 
nature’s first care was for the preservation of man as an animal, in his own 
interest and that of the species; and for this purpose the posture which was 
best adapted to his internal structure, to the position of the fetus, and to pro- 
tection against dangers, was the four-footed one; but we see also that there lay 
in man a germ of reason, through the development of which he was to become 
fitted for society. He consequently assumed the posture most suitable to this, 
that of a biped. By virtue of this, man, on the one hand infinitely surpasses 
the animals; but, on the other hand, he is obliged to endure certain disorders 
that afflict him in consequence of his having raised his head so proudly above 
his former comrades. 
Here, then, Kant readily accepts the doctrine that man was origi- 
nally a four-footed animal, which, pari passu with its unique develop- 
ment of rationality and of the social instincts, assumed the upright atti- 
tude. His promptness in making the views of Moscati his own cer- 
tainly indicates a general predisposition to evolutionary ways of think- 
ing; and, if we had no other expressions of Kant’s dealing with the 
subject more directly, it would be not unnatural to construe this asser- 
tion of the descent of civilized man from quadrupedal ancestors as 
equivalent to an assertion of the mutability of species. Yet the latter 
doctrine, it must be noted, is nowhere expressed or directly implied in 
the review of Moscati; and it will presently become clear that Kant 
would not have regarded it as a legitimate inference from any of his 
admissions about the earlier condition of humanity. From the time of 
publication of this review to the end of his life Kant seems to have 
remained what may be called an anthropological evolutionist; but he 
deliberately refused to make the transition from this position to a gen- 
eral biological evolutionism. 
*® Moscati was professor of anatomy at the University of Pavia. His book 
appeared in 1770; a German translation by Beckmann, professor in Gottingen, 
was published in 1771. 
(To be continued) 
VOL. LXXVi1I.—38. 
