Mechanism and Materialism in Kantu27s Pre-critcial Writings　　-Origins of his natural-philosophic thought in Stephen Halesu27 and Maupertuisu27 writings?

摘要

Friedrich Engelsu27 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.