Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/549

Rh 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.

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

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