For part of this theory Kant was indebted to Thomas Wright of Durham (1711-1786). Wright was the son of a carpenter, became apprenticed to a watchmaker, went to sea, later became an engraver, a maker of mathematical instruments, rose to affluence, wrote a book on navigation, and was offered a professorship of navigation in the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg. It was in 1750 that he published, in the form of nine letters, the work that stimulated the mind of Kant, _An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe_. The author thought that the revelation of the structure of the heavens naturally tended to propagate the principles of virtue and vindicate the laws of Providence. He regarded the universe as an infinity of worlds acted upon by an eternal Agent, and full of beings, tending through their various states to a final perfection. Who, conscious of this system, can avoid being filled with a kind of enthusiastic ambition to contribute his atom toward the due admiration of its great and Divine Author? Wright discussed the nature of mathematical certainty and the various degrees of moral probability proper for conjecture (thus pointing to a distinction that ultimately became basal in the philosophy of Kant). When he claimed that the sun is a vast body of blazing matter, and that the most distant star is also a sun surrounded by a system of planets, he knew that he was reasoning by analogy and not enunciating what is immediately demonstrable. Yet this multitude of worlds opens out to us an immense field of probation and an endless scene of hope to ground our expectation of an ever future happiness upon, suitable to the native dignity of the awful Mind which made and comprehended it. The most striking part of Wright's _Original Theory_ relates to the construction of the Milky Way, which he thought analogous in form to the rings of Saturn. From the center the arrangement of the systems and the harmony of the movements could be discerned, but our solar system occupies a section of the belt, and what we see of the creation gives but a confused picture, unless by an effort of imagination we attain the right point of view. The various cloudy stars or light appearances are nothing but a dense accumulation of stars. What less than infinity can circumscribe them, less than eternity comprehend them, or less than Omnipotence produce or support them? He passes on to a discussion of time and space with regard to the known objects of immensity and duration, and in the ninth letter says that, granting the creation to be circular or orbicular, we can suppose in the center of the whole an intelligent principle, the to-all-extending eye of Providence, or, if the creation is real, and not merely ideal, a sphere of some sort. Around this the suns keep their orbits harmoniously, all apparent irregularities arising from our eccentric view. Moreover, space is sufficient for many such systems.