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

tion based upon mechanical principles. That book had, it is true, been suppressed by its author, who, upon hearing of the treatment received by Galileo, had preferred to take no chances for the prize of martyrdom. But he had in Pt. V. of the "Discourse on Method" recapitulated briefly the outline of his scheme of world-evolution; in the "Principia" he had given some of the details of it; and the treatise itself, or a revision of the principal part of it, had been published after his death by his friend Clerselier, in 1664. "While refraining, with what might seem sufficiently unimpeachable orthodoxy, from maintaining that the present constitution of the world actually had been evolved, rather than created ready made, Descartes also insisted that it was perfectly conceivable that it should have been evolved. He declared himself ready, if given as a starting point even "a chaos more confused and involved than any poet ever could describe," to deduce, with the aid only of the ordinary laws of the motion of matter, the necessity of the gradual formation out of that primeval chaos of a world having the characters and the contents of the world as man now finds it. He endeavored to show how matter "must needs, in consequence of those laws, have arranged itself in a certain way which made it similar to our heavens; how some of its parts would necessarily become an earth, and some planets and comets, and others a sun and fixed stars. And. . . coming to speak more particularly of the earth," he set forth, "how the mountains, seas, fountains and rivers can naturally have been formed in it, and the metals have come to exist in the mines, and the plants to grow in the fields, and, in general, how all the bodies which are called mixed or composite could have been generated."

Now, it is certain that Kant had the cosmogony of Descartes in mind in writing the "Universal Natural History," for he refers to it in his preface. Defending himself against the imputation of materialism and irreligion, Kant writes:

I shall not be refused the justice which fair judges have always rendered to Descartes, with respect to his attempt to explain the formation of the world from purely mechanical laws. I therefore cite the remark upon this subject of the authors of the "Universal History": "We can not but think the essay of the philosopher who endeavored to account for the formation of the world in a certain time from rude matter, from the sole continuation of a motion once impressed, and reduced to a few simple and general laws; or of others who have since attempted the same, with more applause, from the original properties of matter, with which it was endued at the creation, is so far from being criminal or injurious to God, as some have imagined, that it is rather giving a more sublime idea of his infinite wisdom."[1]

Thus Kant, anticipating vituperation from the orthodox on account of his cosmic evolutionism, pleads not only the Cartesian precedent, but

  1. ↑ The version of the citation here given is that of the original English, as in Hastie's "Kant's Cosmogony."
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