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

also the favorable views already taken of that precedent by writers of recognized respectability.

Moreover, as the passage just cited indicates, Descartes was not the only, though he was the most eminent, predecessor of Kant to set an example of an undertaking similar to that upon which Kant was entering. Hypotheses about the origin of the world or of our planet may be said to have been especially in fashion during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In the words of Cuvier,[1]

The end of the seventeenth century saw the birth of a new science, which took in its infancy the high-sounding name of "Theory of the Earth." Starting from a small number of facts badly observed, connecting them by fantastic suppositions, it professed to go back to the origin of worlds, to, as it were, play with them, and to create their history.

The "Theoria Telluris Sacra," 1681, 1689, and the "Archseologise Philosophies," 1692, of Thomas Burnet, and the "New Theory of the Earth," 1696, of William Whiston—successor to Newton's professorship at Cambridge, effective popularizer of the Newtonian doctrines, and the supposed original of Goldsmith's "Dr. Primrose"—were based upon an incongruous mixture of scientific and scriptural considerations; but they at least made cosmogony a topic of general interest. As much, if little more, can be said of Woodward's "Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies," 1695. But in 1734 there was published at Leipsic a treatise which resembled Laplace's theory much more nearly than did Kant's. The "Principia rerum naturalium" of Swedenborg—already celebrated as a geologist and metallurgist, not yet celebrated as a mystic and religious reformer—enunciated the following theses:[2]

That the sun is the center of a vortex; that it rotates upon its axis; that the solar matter concentrated itself into a belt or zone or ring at the equator, or rather at the ecliptic; that by the attenuation of the ring it became disrupted; that upon the disruption, parts of the matter collected into globes; . . . that the globes of solar matter were projected into space; . . . that in proportion as the igneous matter thus projected receded from the sun it gradually experienced refrigeration and consequent condensation; that hence followed the formation of the elements of ether, air, aqueous vapor, etc., until the planets finally reached their present orbit; that during this period the earth experienced a succession of geological changes which originated all the varieties in the mineral kingdom, and laid, as it were, the basis of the vegetable and afterwards of the animal kingdoms.

The idea of planetary evolution was thus anything but a novelty in 1755. What is more, the decade immediately preceding the completion of Kant's "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte" may be said to have been especially distinguished by the prominence with which, during it, questions of cosmogony were brought to the attention of the learned world.

  1. ↑ "Eloge de Werner," cited in Packard's "Lamarck," p. 92.
  2. ↑ I borrow the summary of Clissold, from his introduction to the English translation of Swedenborg's "Principia," 1846.
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