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. |
Return to Large-Scale Distribution of Galaxies.