Kant, undertaking not the explanation of any particular phenomena but
of that which we call nature as a whole, had an origin of species
of his own, an account of the flora and fauna of consciousness. He
denied any specific tendency of the elements of consciousness, but
taking our own consciousness, pointed out that in which it resembled
any consciousness which could survive, which could give an account of
itself.
He assumes a chance or random world, and as great and small were not
to him any given notions of which he could make use, he did not limit
the chance, the randomness, in any way. But any consciousness which
is permanent must possess certain features—those attributes namely
which give it permanence. Any consciousness like our own is simply a
consciousness which possesses those attributes. The main thing is that
which he calls the unity of apperception, which we have seen above is
simply the statement that a particular set of phases of consciousness
on the basis of complete randomness will be self-conjugate, and so
permanent.
As with Darwin so with Kant, the reason for existence of any feature
comes to this—show that it tends to the permanence of that which
possesses it.
We can thus regard Kant as the creator of the first of the modern
evolution theories. And, as is so often the case, the first effort was
the most stupendous in its scope. Kant does not investigate the origin
of any special part of the world, such as its organisms, its chemical
elements, its social communities of men. He simply investigates the
origin of the whole—of all that is included in consciousness, the
origin of that “thought thing” whose progressive realisation is the
knowable universe.
This point of view is very different from the ordinary one, in which a
man is supposed to be placed in a world like that which he has come to
think of it, and then to learn what he has found out from this model
which he himself has placed on the scene.
We all know that there are a number of questions in attempting an
answer to which such an assumption is not allowable.
Mill, for instance, explains our notion of “law” by an invariable
sequence in nature. But what we call nature is something given in
thought. So he explains a thought of law and order by a thought of an
invariable sequence. He leaves the problem where he found it.
Kant’s theory is not unique and alone. It is one of a number of
evolution theories. A notion of its import and significance can be
obtained by a comparison of it with other theories.
Thus in Darwin’s theoretical world of natural selection a certain
assumption is made, the assumption of indefinite variability—slight
variability it is true, over any appreciable lapse of time, but
indefinite in the postulated epochs of transformation—and a whole chain
of results is shown to follow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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