< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

liefs, can be properly substantiated only by an examination of all the more important writings of Kant (in their approximate chronological order) which bear upon the topic in question. Such an examination will at the same time show that the misapprehensions of his position which have arisen are by no means unnatural results of taking certain of his expressions apart from their contexts and in disregard of the meanings which he was accustomed to give to certain terms.

1. The "Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens."—That Kant in his earliest important writing, the "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels," 1755, gave an outline sketch of cosmic evolution which anticipated the nebular hypothesis of Laplace, is one of the things that every schoolboy knows. Like most such things, it is not exactly true. Kant's cosmological speculations were, as we shall see, in scope and in method and in their most essential principles, extremely dissimilar to the nebular hypothesis. Kant's enterprise was far more ambitious than that of the French astronomer; he was concerned with the evolution of a universe out of primeval chaos, not merely with the formation of a planetary system out of a whirling nebula. As a detail of his scheme, it is true, he sought also to explain how planets are formed, and how their orbital revolution is to be accounted for; but his version of their origin is such as to justify us in classifying him with a school of cosmogonists of much later date than Laplace, who are strongly opposed to Laplace's hypothesis. Kant's treatise in its entirety will, I think, hardly be found to merit the extravagant eulogies which it has won—at any rate, upon the score of originality or of historic influence and importance. On these two points, at least, we shall find it necessary to agree with a German writer who has recently dealt with the book. Gerland says:[1]

An epoch-making or a foundation-laying piece of work it has not been, either for the eighteenth century or the nineteenth. The assertion of Kuno Fischer and others that Kant became by virtue of it "the founder of modern cosmogony," is a false and unhistorical exaggeration. It would be justified only if Kant's book had been the first in its field, and if our present cosmogony had developed in direct dependence upon it; but nothing is farther from being the case—in spite of a number of points of coincidence between Kant's conceptions and contemporary ones.

Gerland adds the opinion that Kant's book remained unknown in its own time, "not because of the bankruptcy of the publisher [which for many years interfered materially with its sale], nor through the fault of the people or of the men of science of Kant's day; it remained unknown through its own faults."

Even at the risk of a somewhat lengthy digression from the question of Kant's place in the history of biology—with which this paper is primarily concerned—I think it worth while to try to make clear the

  1. ↑ Kantstudien, 1905, 417 f.
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