Yet even at the last, though Kant's nature-philosophy became less "monistic," Haeckel finds his biology scarcely less evolutionistic. In the "Kritik of Judgment" Kant, according to Haeckel, still "asserts the necessity of a genealogical conception of the series of organisms, if we at all wish to understand it scientifically." In the supposition of a marked "change of view from Kant's earlier to his later years" with respect to the applicability of the principles of natural causation in the realm of the organic, Osborn concurs with Haeckel. Finally, the writer of the historical article in the volume issued by English biologists in commemoration of the Darwin centenary, declares that Kant may be "best regarded as the culmination of the evolutionist philosophers" of the eighteenth century.[1]
These accounts of Kant's historic position in relation to transformism are interesting but scarcely accurate. Kant wrote for the most part at a time when the conception of organic evolution had been made familiar by two of the most celebrated and most influential men of science of the period, Maupertuis and Buffon. He was himself throughout his life especially interested in two distinct scientific problems, both of which made a consideration of the hypothesis of the mutability of species inevitable, and an acceptance of it natural. He accordingly more than once refers to it. But on no occasion does he unequivocally express belief in it; and on several occasions, some of them in his earlier, some in his "critical," period, he vehemently rejects it. The utmost that can be said for him as a biological evolutionist is that, late in life, he once timidly coquetted with the hypothesis—speaking in a vaguely favorable way of it in the text, and then in a definitely unfavorable way in a footnote; and that at the very end of the century it occurred to him to wonder whether the higher apes may not yet acquire a gait, speech and intellectual powers similar to man's. On the other hand, it is not true that any such change of view as Haeckel and Osborn have described took place in Kant's mind with respect to the possibility of explaining the origin of organisms or the processes of organic life in mechanistic terms. Kant at no time affirmed any such possibility; and he repeatedly gave expression to an emphatic denial of it, in his earlier as well as his later utterances. Upon both this question and the question of descent, so far as any change of emphasis is distinguishable at all in Kant's successive opinions, it is a change in quite the contrary direction to that which Haeckel indicates.
These statements, in view of the wide prevalence of contrary be-
- ↑ J. Arthur Thomson in "Darwin and Modern Science," p. 6. Similar expressions from a number of other writers might be cited. I have myself, before coming to close quarters with the subject, fallen into the error of classifying Kant among the early evolutionists (Popular Science Monthly, November, 1909, p. 513). Yet for the past twenty years a substantially correct account of the matter has been accessible, in a brief article by J. Brock, Biologisches Centralblatt, Bd. VIII., 1888-9, pp. 641-8.
