A Glimpse through the Corridors of Time

Abstract

THE eloquent and exceedingly interesting lecture by Prof. Ball, F.R.S., under the above title, reported in your journal, has brought to my mind a short, far too much forgotten paper by Immanuel Kant. With your permission I will give a few extracts from this paper, which cannot but be interesting to many of your readers. Kant became subsequently very celebrated in a sphere of human knowledge usually considered far removed from natural science, in consequence of which his papers relating to this science are now almost universally overlooked. Nevertheless some of them contain extraordinary glimpses of truth a century or more in advance of this time, glimpses possible only to genius.