KANT AND SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION.
Eant's Cosmogony as shown in his Essay on the Retardation of the Rotation of the Earth. and his Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. Edited and Translated by W. Hastie, D.D., Professor of Divinity, University of Glasgow. (J. Maclehose and Sons, Glasgow.)—This is a welcome piece of work, excellently done. There can be no greater testimony to the power of a thinker than that be should be able to anticipate actual scientific investiga- tion. This was Kant's peculiar achievement, and in regard to it he towers above all other modern philosophers. No doubt he will ever be associated with the great analysis of the pure reason, and rightly so, but his thought on the development of the physical universe stands only next to his pure metaphysics. Kant's " Essay on the Retardation of the Earth's Motion " fell still-born, and was only rescued from oblivion some years after. In it he addresses himself to the problem presented by retarda- tion, and finds the solution in the action of the tides moving from east to west, and in doing so constantly breaking on the surface of the earth in its opposing movement from west to east. Mathematicians since Kant agree that this was an absolutely original discovery, and it is now almost universally accepted. Even more interesting and important was Kant's theory of the heavens, and the origin of the physical universe by meteoric action. This theory is also now widely held by our scientific men, so much so that, as Professor Hastie says, Kant "is undoubtedly to be regarded as the great founder of the modern
scientific conception of Evolution He was thus the pre- career in the eighteenth century of Herbert Spencer and Darwin in the nineteenth ; but he was greater than both in that he established the general principles of which they have only given particular expressions, and in that, through the whole evolu- tionary process, he found an ultimate absolute principle, which
at once transcends and comprehends it all." Kant's great scientific achievements may be regarded as a significant comment on the " Use of the Imagination in Science " as set forth by Tyndall. He worked out his theories by mathematical investi- gations, but his moving impulse was one of the most powerful imaginations ever known. Such a work as this may be called the philosopher's contribution to science. It gives us a perfectly new conception of the powers of the human intellect. Professor Hastie, as editor and translator, has done his work admirably, and we thank him sincerely for opening up this great field of human reason to the English reader. The book is enriched by some interesting appendices.
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