Like everyone in his time, Kant believed in the great chain of being, and like many he extended it to the planets and their inhabitants. The further the planet from the sun, the better; like man, earth was midway. Kant wrote:
“The excellence of thinking natures, their quickness of apprehension, the clarity and vividness of their concepts, which come to them from the impressions of the external world, their capacity to combine these concepts, and finally, their practical efficiency, in short the entire extent of their perfection, becomes higher and more complete in proportion to the remoteness of their dwelling-place from the Sun. Human nature occupies as it were the middle rung of the Scale of Being . . . . equally removed from the two extremes. If the contemplation of the most sublime classes of rational creatures, which inhabit Jupiter and Saturn, arouses his envy and humiliates him with a sense of his own inferiority he may again find contentment and satisfaction by turning his gaze upon those lower grades which, in the planets Venus and Mars, are far below the perfection of human nature.”
Quoted in Toulmin and Goodfield, The Discovery of Time 
, 99.
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