Читать книгу Modern cosmogonies онлайн
18 страница из 31
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.'ssss1