Kant's Contribution

The first breach in this petrified outlook on nature was made by Kant, a philosopher, not a natural scientist.

Kant’s General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens appeared in 1755.

The question of the first impulse was abolished.

The earth and the whole solar system appeared as something that had come into being in the course of time.

Most natural scientists had had a little less of the repugnance to thinking that Newton expressed in the warning: “Physics, beware of metaphysics!”

They would have been compelled from this single brilliant discovery of Kant’s to draw conclusions that would have spared them endless deviations and immeasurable amounts of time and labour wasted in false directions.

Kant’s discovery contained the starting point all further progress.

If the earth were something that had come into being, then its present geological, geographical, and climatic state, and its plants and animals likewise, must be something that had come into being.

It must have had a history of:

• co-existence in space
• succession in time.

Kant’s work remained without immediate results, until many years later when Laplace and Herschel expounded its contents and gave them a deeper foundation.

• This led to the “nebular hypothesis”.

The most important of these were:

• the proper motion of the fixed stars
• the demonstration of a resistant medium in universal space
• the proof furnished by spectral analysis of the chemical identity of the matter of the universe and the existence of such glowing nebular masses as Kant had postulated.

Most of the natural scientists might not have been conscious of the contradiction of a changing earth that bore immutable organisms.

• It was the new idea that nature itself comes into being and passes away.

Geology arose and pointed out that:

• the terrestrial strata formed one after another and deposited one upon another
• the shells and skeletons of extinct animals and the trunks, leaves, and fruits of no longer existing plants contained in these strata.

It meant that only the earth and the plants and animals living on it had a history in time.

Cuvier’s theory of the revolutions of the earth was revolutionary in phrase and reactionary in substance.

In place of a single divine creation, he put a whole series of repeated acts of creation, making the miracle an essential natural agent.

Lyell first brought sense into geology by substituting for the sudden revolutions due to the moods of the creator the gradual effects of a slow transformation of the earth. 2

Lyell’s theory was even more incompatible than any of its predecessors with the assumption of constant organic species.

Gradual transformation of the earth’s surface and of all conditions of life led directly to gradual transformation of the organisms and their adaptation to the changing environment, to the mutability of species.

But tradition is a power both in the Catholic Church and in natural science. For years, Lyell did not see the contradiction.

This is because of the division of labour that had become dominant in natural science. It restricted each person to his special sphere.

Meanwhile, physics made mighty advances in 1842 through 3 persons:

• Mayer in Heilbronn
• Joule in Manchester demonstrated the transformation of heat into mechanical energy and of mechanical energy into heat.
• Grove, an English lawyer, proved that all physical energy, mechanical energy, heat, light, electricity magnetism, indeed even so-called chemical energy, become transformed into one another under definite conditions without any loss of energy occurring

This proved Descartes’ principle that the quantity of motion present in the world is constant.

With that the special physical energies, the as it were immutable “species” of physics, were resolved into variously differentiated forms of the motion of matter, convertible into one another according to definite laws.

The many numbers of physical energies were abolished from science by the proof of their interconnections and transitions.

Physics, like astronomy before it, had arrived at a result that necessarily pointed to the eternal cycle of matter in motion as the ultimate reality.

The rapid development of chemistry, since Lavoisier, and especially since Dalton, also attacked the old ideas of nature.

The creation of inorganic compounds that hitherto had been produced only in the living organisms proved that the laws of chemistry have the same validity for organic and inorganic bodies.

It bridged the gulf between inorganic and organic nature, a gulf that even Kant regarded as forever impassable.

Finally, in the sphere of biological research, also the scientific journeys and expeditions that had been systematically organised since the middle of the previous century, the more thorough exploration of the European colonies in all parts of the world by specialists living there, and further the progress of paleontology, anatomy, and physiology in general, particularly since the systematic use of the microscope and the discovery of the cell, had accumulated so much material that the application of the comparative method became possible and at the same time indispensable.

On one hand, the conditions of life of the various floras and faunas were determined by means of comparative physical geography

On the other hand, the various organisms were compared with one another according to their homologous organs

The more deeply and exactly this research was carried on, the more did the rigid system of an Amphioxus (Sheepshead Lamprey)immutable, fixed organic nature crumble away at its touch.

The separate species of plants and animals became more and more inextricably intermingled.

Animals turned up, such as Amphioxus and Lepidosiren, that made a mockery of all previous classification. Organisms were encountered of which were impossible to classify as plant or animal.

More and more the gaps in the Lepidosiren (South American Lungfish)paleontological record were filled up, compelling even the most reluctant to acknowledge the striking parallelism between the evolutionary history of the organic world as a whole and that of the individual organism, the Ariadne’s thread that was to lead the way out of the labyrinth in which botany and zoology appeared to have become more and more deeply lost.

Almost simultaneously with Kant’s attack on the eternity of the solar system, C. F. Wolff in 1759 launched the first attack on the fixity of species and proclaimed the theory of descent.

But what in his case was still only a brilliant anticipation took firm shape in the hands of Oken, Lamarck, Baer, and was victoriously carried through by Darwin in 1859, exactly a hundred years later.

Almost simultaneously it was established that protoplasm and the cell, which had already been shown to be the ultimate morphological constituents of all organisms, occurred independently as the lowest forms of organic life.

This:

• reduced the gulf between inorganic and organic nature to a minimum
• removed one of the most essential difficulties that had previously stood in the way of the theory of descent of organisms.

The new conception of nature was complete in its main features.

• All rigidity was dissolved
• All fixity dissipated
• All particularity that had been regarded as eternal became transient, the whole of nature shown as moving in eternal flux and cyclical course.

The great founders of Greek philosophy saw the view of the whole of nature:

• from the smallest element to the greatest
• from grains of sand to suns
• from protista to men

These exist in the eternal coming into being and passing away:

• in ceaseless flux
• in un-resting motion and change

Its only essential difference is the Greeks’ base was a brilliant intuition. Our base is strict scientific research in accordance with experience. This gives us a much more definite and clear form.

The empirical proof of this motion is not wholly free from gaps.

• But these are insignificant in comparison with what has already been firmly established
• Each year, they become more and more filled up.*