Large-Scale Distribution of Galaxies

Swedenborg, Kant, and Lambert proposed a cosmology based on hierarchies.
Kant's 1755 essay, "Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, or an Essay on the Constitution and Mechanical Origin of the Entire World-Edifice Treated According to Newtonian Principles," was the first serious scientific cosmological model.
Kant imagined the original unorganized mass of the universe evolving into a hierarchical order through the gravitaional attraction of Newton's theory, balanced by an unnamed repulsive force to prevent everything from accreting into a single lump.
Evidence of the hierarchical ordering was sparse, to be sure.
In the solar system all planets orbit in the same direction, and all satellites orbit the planets in the same direction.
Kant thought the Milky Way was a vast disk of stars, orbiting in the same direction.
The nebulae were similar disks of stars, galaxies like our own.
And so the hierarchy continued, forever in the ideas of Kant and Swedenborg, only to some finite (but large) scale in Lambert's thinking.

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