294 Kant: A Biographyuncomfortable for you to know that our Kant reviewed you. In any case,
keep it to yourself and do not reveal me."^80 He also told Herder that he had
obtained a copy of the review, and that it is waiting to be sent to Herder.
In December 1784, Kant sent to Biester two other essays, "Of the Vol¬
canoes on the Moon" and "On the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books." The
first appeared in the March issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift of 1785.
In it, Kant took up an observation by Aepinus in the Gentlemen's Magazine
of 1784 that was meant to show that Herschel's discovery of a volcano on
the moon (in 1783) confirmed his own theory that the roughness of the
surface of the moon had to be explained by volcanic activity. Kant argued
that Herschel's discovery did not confirm Aepinus's conjecture, because
some of the features of the moon could also be explained by nonvolcanic
activity. After a discussion of the details of such an alternative, he turned
toward a more general point that was of greater interest to him, namely,
that the features of all the objects in space {Weltkörper) "originated in very
much the same way. They all were first in a fluid state."^81 Kant thought that
their globular shape proved this. Given that they were fluid, and that their
fluidity presupposes heat, he asked where the heat might have come from
originally. Buffon's explanation, which derived it from the heat of the sun,
from which they all originated, was not satisfactory. Kant proposed instead
that when bodies formed by the aggregation and densification of gassy
matter, the warmth of the gasses also increased. This would explain also
the heat of the sun, in accordance with physical laws that still hold. One
thing we should do under no circumstances, however, is to appeal to God's
will and plan whenever we have difficulty explaining a phenomenon.
The essay "On the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books" appeared in the
May issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift of 1785. It presented an argu¬
ment against the illegitimate republication of books, based not on the claim
that property rights attach to copies of books, but rather on the idea that a
publisher is the agent of someone else, namely the author. He is thus not so
much selling books on his own account, but rather doing it for the author.
If someone reprints a book without permission of the author, he is acting
on behalf of the author without being authorized to do so. He must there¬
fore reimburse the author or his agent for any damage he might have caused
by this transaction. Kant's essay is a tightly argued defense of this claim
and some supplementary principles. Since he was by this time the author
of many books, he had an obvious interest in establishing that illegitimate
reprinting was unjust and should be punished by law. It might also show