Immanuel Kant was, in 1751, still in the plastic stage. His period of 'pure reason' was remote, and might have appeared improbable. Such as they were, his distinctions had been won in the field of concrete science, and the world of phenomena invited his speculations more seductively than the subtleties of logic. A seed was accordingly thrown into fertile soil by his reading of Thomas Wright's _New Theory of the Universe_, as summarized in a Hamburg journal. It set him thinking, and his thoughts proved to be of the dynamic order. Wright regarded the heavens under a merely statical aspect. He laid down the first definite plan of their construction, showing that the stars were not scattered at random, but aggregated by method; and this was much for one necessitous human being to have accomplished unaided. But the young professor of Königsberg could not rest satisfied with the idle contemplation of any subsisting arrangement. His mind was incapable of acquiescing in things simply as they presented themselves; it craved to know further how they came to stand to each other in just such mutual relations. He was, moreover, permeated with Epicurean doctrines. Not in any reprehensible sense. He could not be reproached either as a hedonist or as an atheist. His pleasures were intellectual, his morals austere, his convictions orthodox. Behind the veil of material existence he divined its supreme immaterial Originator, and his perception of the activity in Nature of an ordering First Cause remained equally vivid, whether its disclosures were taken to be by immediate creation or through tedious processes of modification and growth. His large and luminous view embraced besides the ethical significance which such processes adumbrate. The following sentence shows an appreciation of the place of man in Nature truer and more profound than was attained perhaps by any other of his philosophical contemporaries: 'The cosmic evolution of Nature,' he wrote in memorable words, 'is continued in the historic development of humanity, and completed in the moral perfection of the individual.'[3]