12

TELEOLOGY IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY BEFORE KANT.

sary for this change is the smallest possible." By employing the proper mathematical formulæ for finding minima, several laws of motion are then deduced; but it tends to awaken some doubt in the mind of the reader as to the infallibility of the method when he finds that Leibniz and Fermat reached a wrong law, though also proceeding from a principle which seemed to them in accordance with supreme wisdom, viz: "That Intelligence in producing its effects proceeds always in the simplest manner, and hence light should move in such a way as to reach a given point quickest."

II.

THE TELEOLOGY OF KANT FOR THE PERIOD

ENDING 1762.

1. Kant as well as Maupertuis was apparently repelled by the barrenness and pettiness of the prevailing method which, as Holbach remarked in the Système de la Nature, copied books of anatomy and physiology and called them proofs, without making any attempt to unify and systematize, and so acted to check rather than to further scientific progress. But Kant avoids the uncertain method of deducing his laws from the assumed principles of the divine wisdom. Already in his first published treatise he had criticised the resort of Leibniz to the principle of divine wisdom1 and in the General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens he criticises Newton's use of final causes to explain the density of the planets.2 His confidence in the full validity of physico-theology in his early period is, however, well shown in the fragments of a projected essay on a subject assigned by the Berlin Academy for its prize in the year 1755. This required an investigation of Pope's system, and a comparison of the same with the Optimism of Leibniz. In the fragments which contain his thoughts on the subject we find that he prefers Pope's system to that of Leibniz, in which he criticises the two following defects: In the first place, there is a conflict in the Leibnizian system between the will of God, which aims at the good, and a metaphysical necessity which does not allow the good to be attained. The world is both dependent and independent. The second defect in the system is that the evils and discords in the world are excused only on the presupposition of the existence of God. Physico-theology is therefore out of place since we do not prove the existence of a perfect Being

1 H. I. 104.

2 H, I. 255.

3

3 Edited by Reicke. "Lose Blätter aus Kants' Nachlass." Königsberg 1889 [D. 32, 33].

13

from the order of the world, but must first believe on other grounds that an infinitely good and perfect Being exists. The surest and easiest proof of the reality of an all-sufficient, infinitely wise and good Being who is known from the contemplation of the excellent arrangement which the world everywhere shows, is deprived of its strength through the system of Leibniz." On the other hand, the system of Pope is admirably adapted to give force to this proof, since he shows that all things have such and only such properties as harmonize to express the perfection of the Supreme Being. "Even the most essential and necessary determinations of things, the general laws which are set into a harmonious plan with reference to one another, without any forced union, adapt themselves, as it were, spontaneously to the maintenance of perfect ends." In 1759 we find Kant defending by an a priori argument the proposition of Optimism that this is the best possible world, without any reference to the method of Pope, but the two citicisms of the Leibnizian position, given above, contain the germs of important aspects of his later teleology. In particular he was strongly attracted by the thought that the general laws of the world through an internal rather than an external harmony, express the perfection and so prove the existence of God. This is developed in the treatise on the General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.

2. In connection with the attempt to extend the method of Newton to the formation of solar and stellar systems from primitive matter, Kant gives the essence of the view which appears in greater details in the treatise, The Sole Ground for a Demonstration of the Being of God. This is briefly as follows. The ordinary argument, while emphasizing and praising the beauty and complete adaptation of means to ends in nature, asserts that this harmony is so far foreign to nature herself that if she were left entirely to her universal laws nothing but chaos would result. The harmony shows a hand interfering from without and forcing matter into a wise plan.1 Every phenomenon which can be shown to be the necessary result of universal laws is thus wrested from the domain of teleology, and every advance in science is thus a danger to religion. But, urges Kant, if the universal laws of na

1 H. I. 212 f.

ture have not the tendency to fulfill the plan of highest wisdom, is not one tempted to suspect that matter and its laws are independent of the supreme wisdom, and that this wisdom though great is not all-sufficient? On the other hand, suppose we grant that matter, determined according to its universal laws, produces beauty and all the useful and beneficent results which seem to be the mark of supreme wisdom,- produces them not simply accidentally, but working under laws of mathematical necessity, so that it could work in no other way, "what is to be thought of this consonance? How could things of different natures in connection with one another possibly produce such harmonies and beauties, and this, too, even for the ends of things which in a certain respect lie outside the sphere of dead matter, that is for the uses of men and animals, if these things of different natures did not acknowledge a common origin, namely, an infinite Understanding in which the essential qualities of all things have been projected with reference to one another? If their natures were necessary in themselves and independently, what an astonishing coincidence, or rather what an impossibility that they should fit together with their natural impulses precisely as a wise and considered choice could have united them "1

This position is further strengthened against the method of Wolff and Reimarus by showing that if we take particular constructions as the special ends of God, we immediately find ourselves involved in difficulty when we find the opposite construction. If the inclination of the earth to its axis is due to the immediate hand of God, how explain the fact that Jupiter and Mars, also works of divine wisdom, have no inclination, or almost none??

Is this protest against the common physico-theology a return to the position of Leibniz, or is it a product of Kant's own reflection, suggested perhaps by the similar protest of Manpertuis? It is perhaps not decisive against the dependence on Leibniz that the latter's name is not cited, though as Paulsen remarks it would seem natural to cite Leibniz rather than Descartes as a name by

1 H. I. 215.

2 A. I. 327 f.

3

Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Kantischen Erkenntnisstheorie. p. 57, note.

whose authority a somewhat heretical opinion might be fortified, but the whole tenor of the treatise, it seems to me, indicates rather that the scientific part was suggested by Newton, and that the teleological considerations grew out of the necessary expansion of the teleology of Newton, who had brought in the choice of God as means of explanation when, as he supposed, he had reached the end of mechanical explanation. This would, of course, not imply that Kant was ignorant of the point of view of Leibniz, but it means that his teleology took form and color from his own scientific criticism and extension of Newton's system, stimulated also, as we have seen, by his former comparison of Leibniz and Pope.

4. This opinion of the relation of Kant's early teleology to that of Leibniz is confirmed by a study of the next important treatise in this field, On the Sole Ground for a Demonstration of the Being of God. Aside from the a priori argument which does not concern us here, we have in the second division an a posteriori argument from the unity perceived in the essences of things. This a posteriori argument, with its connected distinction of moral and non-moral dependence, grew out of the teleology of the History of the Heavens. For if, as there maintained, matter working under laws of mathematical necessity produces harmony and beauty, the results of these laws, though dependent on the ultimate reality, are not properly the subject of voluntary choice in the sense in which contingent unities are. "That things exist which have so many beautiful relations is to be attributed to the wise choice of him who produced them for the sake of this harmony; that however each possesses so extended a fitness for manifold agreement through simple grounds, and that by this means an admirable unity could be contained in the whole, this lies entirely in the possibility of things, and since here the contingent element which must be presupposed in the case of every choice, vanishes, the ground of this unity may be sought in a wise being, but not by virtue of his wisdom."1 Now this is a distinction which Leibniz not only did not make but which we can hardly suppose would have been accepted by him in the form in which it was used by Kant. At first sight it may seem like the distinction employed by Leibniz himself between the

1 H. II. 146.