Note 11 — Chapter IX · SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Cf. the curious evidence of Kant’s scientific reading in the Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Analytic, Second Analogy of Experience, where he refers to the phenomenon of capillary action. This is an unnecessarily complex illustration; a book resting on a table would have equally well sufficed. But the subject had just been adequately treated for the first time by Clairaut in an appendix to his Figure of the Earth. Kant evidently had read this appendix, and his mind was full of it.