< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu
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KANT AND EVOLUTION

search seems to disclose is not in the least such as Kant imagined. Kant himself is at pains to notify his readers, in his preface, that his reasonings on the subject do not pretend to "extreme geometrical precision and mathematical infallibility." Yet it can not be denied that in the body of the work Kant presents his hypothesis as if it could be, and had been, established with rather more than a high degree of probability.

If all the worlds and systems of worlds acknowledge the same mode of origination; if attraction is unlimited and universal, while the repulsion of the elements is likewise everywhere active; if in the infinite both great and small are small alike;—then must not all these worlds have received the same relative constitution and systematic arrangement as that which the bodies of our own solar system exhibit on a small scale?. . . If, again, these are viewed as members in the great chain of Universal Nature, then there is still the same reason to think of them, in turn, as existing in the same reciprocal relations and interconnections—which, in virtue of the primary structural law ruling all nature, make of them a new and greater system, ruled by a body of incomparably mightier attractive force at the center of their systematically ordered positions.

Thus the whole universe will compose a single system held together "by the connecting power of gravity and of centrifugal force." For if it were made up, instead, of a multitude of irregularly scattered systems, of groups of stars not in revolution about a central body, Kant argues that, in order to prevent the reciprocal attractions of these systems from "destroying them" there would be requisite

such an exactly measured disposition of them at distances proportionate to the attractions, that even the slightest displacement of them would bring about the ruin of the universe. . . . But a world-order that could not maintain itself without a miracle would lack that character of stability which is the distinguishing mark of the designs of God. It is therefore far more consistent with those designs to make the whole creation a single system in which all the worlds and systems of worlds that fill the whole of infinite space stand related to a single center.[1]

It will, I suppose, hardly be maintained, even by Kant's most devout admirers, that in his argumentation in behalf of his "theory of the heavens "he displays a high degree of scientific caution or a very nice sense for the distinction between the considerations that are, and those that are not, admissible in scientific inference.

The second undeveloped problem which Newton had left to tempt the ingenuity of his disciples was the problem of cosmogony. In attacking this upon Newtonian principles Kant showed no greater originality; he had many forerunners in the enterprise, in the preceding half century, and the enterprise itself was an obvious one. For the celestial mechanics of Descartes had found one of its earliest and most striking applications in a cosmogony. Descartes's first book, his "Traité du Monde," written in 1633, had been chiefly a treatise on cosmic evolu-

  1. ↑ "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte," 1798 ed., pp. 77-85; tr. in Hastie, "Kant's Cosmogony," p. 136 f.
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