- 著者
-
渡辺 祐邦
Yuho WATANABE
- 出版者
- 北見工業大学
- 雑誌
- 北見工業大学研究報告
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.3, no.2, pp.513-534, 1972-06
Friedrich Engels' praise for Kant that none of the scientists but a philosopher did destruct the fossil world view of the seventeenth-century mechanists is misleading. The doctrines which Kant assumed in his revolution-minded Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (1755) were not completely original. The conception of the interacting attractive and repulsive forces,on which Kant set his theory of nebula, was first conceived by Stephen Hales,a noted British physiologist, whose Vegetable Staticks(1727) was translated into French by the famous French naturalist Buffon in 1732, and was well-known to Kant. Meanwhile,Pierre Moreau de Maupertuis,a celebrated French scientist and president of the Academy of Berlin from 1745 on,declared,in his Essay de Cosmologie(1750),that every proof of the existence of God drawn from natural phenomena,including the structure of animals,was insufficient as well as that the mechanistic explanation was incapable of the biological facts observed at that time. Then,in Systeme de la Nature(1751),he postulated properties like desire and memory in the matter. These were also familier to Kant, as his writings show. He discarded, as Maupertuis did, the atomist theory of the origin of the world and granted that there must be,though hidden for us,a purposive or teleological principle in the organic matter.