First Division. Analytic of the teleological power of judgment

§ 62. On objective purposiveness that is merely formal, as distinguished from the material kind

Every geometrical figure drawn according to a principle exhibits in itself a manifold and often admired objective purposiveness, namely a fitness for the solution of many problems by a single principle, and indeed of each individual problem in infinitely varied ways. The purposiveness here is manifestly objective and intellectual, not merely subjective and aesthetic. For it expresses the adequacy of the figure for producing many intended shapes, and is cognized by reason. Yet this purposiveness does not make possible the concept of the object itself, that is, the object is not regarded as possible merely with a view to this use.

In a figure as simple as the circle there lies the ground for the solution of a host of problems, each of which taken by itself would demand various apparatus, and which follows as if of its own accord as one among the infinitely many excellent properties of this figure. If the task is, for example, to construct a triangle from a given base line and the angle opposite to it, the problem is indeterminate, that is, it can be solved in infinitely manifold ways. Yet the circle comprises them all together, as the geometrical locus of all triangles that conform to this condition. Or let two lines cross one another so that the rectangle contained by the two segments of the first equals that contained by the two segments of the second: to all appearances, resolving such a task carries much difficulty. But all lines that intersect within the circle whose circumference bounds each of them divide themselves of their own accord in this proportion. The other curved lines in turn furnish still further purposive solutions that were not at all thought of in the rule constituting their construction. Every conic section, whether considered on its own or set beside the others, teems with principles by which a multitude of possible problems may be resolved, no matter how plain the definition that fixes its concept. — It is a genuine joy to watch the ardor with which the ancient geometers pursued these properties belonging to lines of this kind, refusing to be unsettled by the question, raised by narrow intellects, of what good such knowledge could possibly do; the parabola, for instance, they studied without knowing the law of gravity here on earth — the law that would have furnished them the means of applying that curve to the flight path of projected heavy bodies (whose gravitational direction throughout their motion may be taken as parallel); or the ellipse, never guessing that gravity resides in the celestial bodies as well, nor acquainted with its law at the various distances from the center of attraction, the very thing that makes those bodies trace this line in unconstrained motion. Even as they toiled here for later generations without themselves being aware of it, they took pleasure in a purposiveness residing within the essence of things, one they were nevertheless able to exhibit wholly a priori in its necessity. Plato, himself a master of this science, fell — on account of such an original constitution of things, whose discovery lets us do without all experience, and on account of the mind's power to draw the harmony of beings out of their supersensible principle (to which one may add those numerical properties that the mind toys with in music) — into an enthusiasm that lifted him past the concepts of experience up to ideas which, to his mind, seemed explicable only through an intellectual fellowship with the origin of all beings. It is no wonder that he turned away from his school anyone unversed in geometry, in that he supposed himself able to derive, from the pure intuition dwelling inwardly in the human spirit, what Anaxagoras had inferred from objects of experience and their purposive connection. For the very ground of that great admiration of nature — a ground residing not so much beyond us as in our own reason — is to be found in the necessity attaching to whatever is purposive and framed as though it had been set up on purpose for our use, and yet appears to pertain from the outset to the essence of things, taking no account whatever of that use; and here it is quite pardonable that such admiration, by way of misunderstanding, should little by little have mounted to the pitch of fanaticism.

This intellectual purposiveness, however, although it is objective (and not subjective like the aesthetic), can nonetheless, with respect to its possibility, be quite well comprehended, though only in general, as merely formal (not real), that is, as a purposiveness without there being any need to lay an end at its foundation, and hence without any need of teleology for it. The circle's figure is an intuition that the understanding has settled upon in conformity with a principle: this principle, whose unity I posit arbitrarily and lay down as a concept, once brought to bear on a form of intuition — namely space — which likewise is encountered in me solely as a representation, and that a priori, renders intelligible the unity of the many rules that flow from constructing the said concept, rules purposive in a variety of possible aims, and it does so without allowing us to place beneath this purposiveness any end or any other ground for it. Matters stand otherwise here than they would if, within some collection of things outside me shut in by certain limits — a garden, say — I were to encounter order and regularity among the trees, flower beds, walkways, and the like, which I could not hope to derive a priori from my bounding of a space carried out by some arbitrary rule of my choosing: for these are things that exist, things that have to be given empirically if they are to be cognized, rather than a bare representation within me fixed a priori in accordance with a principle. The latter (empirical) purposiveness therefore depends, as something real, upon the concept of an end.

But the ground of the admiration of a purposiveness, even though one perceived in the essence of things (insofar as their concepts can be constructed), can also be very well grasped, and grasped indeed as legitimate. These diverse rules, whose unity (issuing from a single principle) is what stirs up such admiration, are without exception synthetic, and rather than following from any concept of the object — of the circle, say — they demand that this object be presented in intuition. Through this, however, this unity takes on the appearance of having empirically an external ground of the rules distinct from our power of representation, and thus that the agreement of the object with the need for rules, a need proper to the understanding, is contingent in itself, and hence possible only through an end expressly directed to that agreement. Now, to be sure, this very harmony, because, notwithstanding all this purposiveness, it is nonetheless cognized not empirically but a priori, ought of itself to bring us to acknowledge that space—by whose determination (through the imagination conformably to a concept) the object was alone possible—is no property of the things outside me but only a mode of representing in me, and thus that, into the figure I trace suited to a concept, that is, into my own way of representing whatever is externally given to me, be it in itself what it may, it is I who introduce the purposiveness, and that I receive no empirical instruction concerning it from this object, and consequently that I require for that purposiveness no particular end in the object outside me. Yet since such a consideration already calls for a critical employment of reason, and therefore cannot straightaway be included in the appraisal of the object according to its properties: what the latter appraisal hands me directly is nothing but a uniting of heterogeneous rules (even as regards whatever is unlike in them) under one principle — a principle that, without demanding for itself any special ground lying beyond my concept, and beyond my representation a priori in general, is all the same cognized by me a priori as genuinely valid. Now astonishment is a shock the mind receives at the incompatibility of a representation, and of the rule given through it, with the principles already lying at its foundation, a shock that therefore produces a doubt as to whether one has really seen or judged correctly; admiration, however, is an ever-recurring astonishment despite the vanishing of this doubt. The latter, accordingly, is an entirely natural upshot of that observed purposiveness within the essence of things (taken as appearances) — an upshot that cannot on this account be faulted, given that the agreement between that form of sensible intuition (the one we name space) and the faculty of concepts (namely the understanding) is not merely inexplicable to us because it happens to be just this form and no other, but is over and above that enlarging for the mind, inviting it as it were to sense something reaching yet further beyond those sensible representations, wherein — unknown to us though it be — the final ground of that concord might be met with. Knowing this ground is admittedly not something we require so long as nothing more than the formal purposiveness of our representations a priori is at issue; yet the mere obligation to gaze out that far already inspires, at once, admiration for the object that drives us to do so.

It is customary to call the properties just noted — those of geometrical shapes, and indeed those of numbers as well — beauty, owing to a certain purposiveness they possess for all manner of a priori cognitive use, a purposiveness one would not have looked for from the simplicity of their construction; and one will speak, for instance, of this or that beautiful property of the circle, uncovered in one way or another. It is, however, by no aesthetic judging that we find them purposive; not a conceptless judging, one that would bring to notice a merely subjective purposiveness within the unconstrained interplay of our cognitive powers: but an intellectual judging that proceeds by concepts, one giving us to cognize distinctly an objective purposiveness, i.e., a fitness for ends of every kind (manifold to infinity). It would be more fitting to name it a relative perfection rather than a beauty belonging to the mathematical figure. Nor, indeed, can the term intellectual beauty be suitably allowed at all: since otherwise the word beauty would forfeit every determinate meaning, or else the intellectual satisfaction would forfeit any precedence it holds over the sensible. It would sooner be a demonstration of such properties that one could pronounce beautiful, since through it the understanding, as the power of concepts, together with the imagination, as the power of presenting them a priori, feel themselves fortified (which, taken with the precision that reason imports, goes jointly under the name of the elegance of such a demonstration): for here at least the satisfaction, even though its ground resides in concepts, is subjective, whereas perfection brings an objective satisfaction along with it.

§ 63. On the relative purposiveness of nature as distinguished from inner purposiveness

Only where a relation of cause to effect stands to be judged²³ does experience direct our power of judgment toward the concept of an objective and material purposiveness—that is, toward the concept of an end of nature; and such a relation we are able to recognize as law-governed solely by placing the idea of the effect beneath the causality of its cause, taken as the condition that, grounding that causality itself, makes the former possible. But this may occur in two different manners: we regard the effect either directly as a product of art, or else merely as material for the art of other possible natural beings—hence either as an end, or as a means to the purposive employment of other causes. This second purposiveness goes by the name of usefulness (for human beings), or likewise beneficialness (for any other creature), and it remains merely relative, while the first is an inner purposiveness belonging to the natural being.

Rivers, for example, carry along with them all sorts of soil serviceable to the growth of plants, which they deposit sometimes in the midst of the land, often also at their mouths. The tide bears this silt over the land along many a coast, or lays it down on its shore; and when human beings above all lend a hand so that the ebb does not carry it off again, the fertile land increases, and the vegetable kingdom gains ground where formerly fish and shellfish had their abode. Most enlargements of land of this kind have probably been accomplished by nature itself, and it still carries on with them, though slowly. — Now the question arises whether this is to be judged as an end of nature, because it contains a usefulness for human beings; for the usefulness for the vegetable kingdom itself cannot be brought into the reckoning, since just as much is withdrawn from the sea creatures on the other side as advantage accrues to the land.

Or, to offer an instance of how certain natural things prove beneficial as means to other creatures (supposing these are posited as ends): for spruces no ground thrives better than sandy ground. Before the primeval sea drew back from the land, it had deposited in our northern territories such broad tracts of sand that upon this ground, otherwise wholly unfit for any cultivation, sprawling spruce forests could establish themselves—forests for whose irrational eradication we often accuse our ancestors; and one may then ask whether that most ancient laying-down of the sand-strata served as an end of nature on behalf of the spruce forests made possible upon them. So much is evident: that whoever admits these as an end of nature must concede sand as well, though only as a relative end, whose means was in turn the old seacoast together with its receding; for within a chain whose links stand subordinated one to another in a nexus of ends, each connecting link has to count as an end (though not, of course, as a final end), the link for which its immediately preceding cause serves as the means. Likewise, were cattle, sheep, horses, and the like ever to be present in the world, grass had of necessity to spring up on the earth; but salt-herbs, too, had to grow in the sandy wastes if camels were to flourish, just as these and other grass-feeding species had to be met with in plenty if wolves, tigers, and lions were ever to exist. Hence the objective purposiveness founded upon beneficialness is no objective purposiveness inhering in the things as they are in themselves, as if the sand, on its own, could not be comprehended as an effect arising out of its cause, the sea, without ascribing an end to that sea and viewing the effect—namely the sand—as a work of art. Such purposiveness is merely relative, and merely accidental to the very thing to which it is ascribed; and although, among the examples cited, the kinds of grass are on their own to be judged as organized products of nature, and hence as full of art, still, in relation to the animals that feed on them, they are regarded as mere raw matter.

But when the human being goes still further and, by the freedom of his causality, turns natural things to his frequently foolish purposes (the bright bird-feathers to adorn his garments, tinted earths or plant-saps for cosmetic paint)—and at times, from a rational purpose, the horse to ride, the ox, and in Minorca even the ass and the swine to plow with—then not even a relative natural end (for such use) may be assumed here. For his reason knows how to endow things with a fitness to his capricious whims—a fitness for which nature itself had by no means predestined him. Only if it be granted that human beings were meant to dwell upon the earth can it follow that, at the very least, the means cannot be lacking whereby they were able to persist as animals—and indeed as rational animals (to however humble a degree); and in that event those natural things that are indispensable for this end would likewise have to be counted as natural ends.

It is easy to gather from all this that external purposiveness (one thing's beneficialness for others) admits of being taken as an external natural end solely provided that the existence of whatever it benefits, be it nearby or at some remove, is in its own right an end of nature. But since the latter can never be made out by mere observation of nature, the consequence is that relative purposiveness, though it points only hypothetically to natural ends, still authorizes no absolute teleological judgment.

Snow protects the seed-crops in cold countries against the frost; it eases the intercourse of human beings (by means of sledges); the Laplander finds there animals that bring about this intercourse (reindeer), which find ample nourishment in a dry moss that they must themselves scratch out from under the snow, and which nonetheless let themselves be tamed with ease and be willingly robbed of the freedom in which they could perfectly well have sustained themselves. For other peoples in the same frigid zone the sea holds a rich store of animals which, besides the food and clothing they supply, and the wood which the sea as it were floats down to them for their dwellings, furnish them further with fuel for warming their huts. Here, then, one meets with an admirable convergence of so many of nature's relations upon a single end; and that end is the Greenlander, the Lapp, the Samoyed, the Yakut, and so forth. Yet why human beings should have to live there in the first place is not something one perceives. To say, therefore: that for this reason vapors from the air in the form of snow fall down, that the sea has its currents which float thither the wood grown in warmer countries, and that great sea-animals filled with oil are present, because the idea of an advantage for certain wretched creatures lies at the basis of the cause that procures all these natural products, would be a very daring and arbitrary judgment. For even if all this natural usefulness were absent, we should miss nothing in the sufficiency of the natural causes for this constitution; rather, so much as to demand such a disposition, and to impute such an end to nature (since, apart from this, it was only the utmost incompatibility of human beings among themselves that could have scattered them into such inhospitable regions), would strike us as being itself presumptuous and thoughtless.

§ 64. On the distinctive character of things as natural ends

To grasp that a thing can be possible solely as an end—that is, to have to seek the causality behind its origin not within nature's mechanism but instead in a cause whose power to produce effects is settled by concepts—the following is demanded: that its form not admit of being possible under mere natural laws, namely those which we, applying the understanding by itself to objects of the senses, are able to cognize; but rather that even its empirical cognition, in respect of its cause and effect, should presuppose concepts of reason. This contingency of its form, in relation to reason and across all empirical natural laws—for reason, obliged to recognize in each form of a natural product likewise the necessity belonging to it, if it would grasp even merely the conditions tied to that product's generation, is nonetheless unable to accept this necessity in the given form—already furnishes a ground for taking the causality of that thing to be such that, on that very account, it could be possible only through reason; and reason is in that case the capacity for acting according to ends (a will); and the object, which one represents to oneself as possible only as something proceeding from this, would in that case be represented as possible only as an end.

Suppose that, in a country seeming to him uninhabited, a person noticed a geometrical figure—perhaps a regular hexagon—traced in the sand: his reflection, in working out a concept of it, would then apprehend, however dimly, through the mediation of reason, the unity in the principle of its production, and, guided by this, would decline to judge the sand, the sea nearby, the winds, or even animals whose footprints he is familiar with, or any other cause lacking reason, as a ground for the possibility of such a shape: for the sheer contingency involved in its coinciding with a concept of this sort, one that only reason can render possible, would strike him as so boundlessly great that it would come to the same thing as if no natural law governed it whatsoever, so that no cause within nature operating merely mechanically, but solely the concept of such an object—as a concept that reason alone can furnish and by which alone reason can measure the object—could equally contain the causality for such an effect, and hence this could be regarded outright as an end, though not as a natural end, that is, as a product of art (vestigium hominis video).

But to judge something that one recognizes as a natural product nonetheless also as an end—hence as a natural end—for this, provided there is not perhaps some contradiction lurking here, still more is required. I would say provisionally: a thing exists as a natural end when it is, of itself (though in a twofold sense) both cause and effect; for what lies in this is a causality that cannot be bound up with the bare concept of a nature so long as no end is laid beneath it, and which, though it may then at least be thought without contradiction, still cannot be comprehended. Before expounding this idea of a natural end in full, let us begin by clarifying its determination through an example.

A tree, in the first place, generates another tree according to a known law of nature. But the tree that it produces is of the same species; and thus it produces itself as regards its species, within which, being on the one hand effect and on the other hand cause, ceaselessly brought forth by itself and likewise often bringing itself forth, it perpetually preserves itself as a species.

Secondly, a tree also produces itself as an individual. This kind of effect we call, to be sure, merely growth; but growth is to be taken in such a sense that it is wholly distinct from any other increase in magnitude according to mechanical laws and is to be reckoned as equivalent to a generation, albeit under a different name. The matter that it adds to itself this growing thing first works up into a specifically distinctive quality that the mechanism of nature outside it cannot supply, and it develops itself further by means of a material that, in its composition, is its own product. For although, as regards the constituents that it receives from the nature outside it, it must be regarded merely as an educt: still, in the separation and fresh recombination of this raw material there is to be found such an originality in the separative and formative capacity of this kind of natural being that all art remains infinitely far removed from it when it attempts to reconstitute those products of the vegetable kingdom out of the elements it obtains by decomposing them, or out of the material that nature supplies for their nourishment.

Thirdly, one part of this creature likewise brings itself forth in such a fashion: that the maintenance of the one hangs reciprocally upon the maintenance of the other. The bud on the leaf of one tree, inoculated into the branch of another, brings forth on an alien stock a growth of its own kind, and likewise does the graft-scion upon another trunk. Hence one may also regard, on one and the same tree, every branch or leaf as merely grafted or budded onto it, and thus as a tree existing for itself, one that merely attaches itself to another and feeds parasitically upon it. At the same time the leaves are indeed products of the tree, yet they in turn also sustain it; for were it stripped of its foliage again and again this would kill it, and its growth rests on the effect they exert upon the trunk. The self-help of nature in these creatures upon their injury, where the lack of a part that belonged to the preservation of the neighboring ones is made good by the rest; the malformations or deformities in growth, where certain parts, on account of deficiencies or obstacles that arise, shape themselves in an entirely new way so as to preserve what is there and to bring forth an anomalous creature: these I will mention here only in passing, notwithstanding that they belong among the most marvelous properties of organized creatures.

§ 65. Things as natural ends are organized beings

By the character adduced in the foregoing §, a thing meant to be cognized as a natural product while nonetheless being possible solely as a natural end must relate itself to itself reciprocally as cause and effect — an expression somewhat improper and indeterminate, one that calls for derivation from a determinate concept.

So far as it is conceived merely by means of the understanding, the causal connection is a linkage constituting a series (of causes and effects) that proceeds ever downward; and the very things that, being effects, presuppose others as cause cannot at the same time serve reciprocally as cause of those. This causal connection is called that of efficient causes (nexus effectivus). Yet on the other hand a causal connection may likewise be conceived according to a concept of reason (that of ends), a connection which, taken as a series, would bring with it dependency in both directions, downward and upward alike, such that the thing once labeled an effect still, in the upward direction, merits being called the cause of the very thing whose effect it is. Within the practical domain (that is, in art) such a linkage is readily met with — the house, for example, being indeed the cause of the monies received as rent, while conversely the representation of this prospective income was itself the cause of the house's construction. Such a causal linkage is called that of final causes (nexus finalis). One might perhaps more fittingly call the former the linkage of real causes, and the second that of ideal causes, since this naming at once makes it understood that causality admits of no more than these two kinds.

For a thing considered as a natural end it is now demanded, first of all, that its parts—in respect of their existence as well as their form—be possible solely through the way they bear on the whole. For the thing is itself an end, and is therefore grasped under a concept or idea that has to determine a priori all that is meant to be contained within it. But so far as a thing is held to be possible in this manner alone, it amounts to no more than a work of art, that is, the product of a rational cause set apart from that thing's matter (its parts), a cause whose causality (in gathering and joining the parts) is determined by the idea it possesses of a whole thereby rendered possible (and thus not by the nature outside it).

Should a thing, however, as a natural product, nonetheless harbor in itself and in its inner possibility a bearing upon ends—that is, to be possible solely as a natural end and apart from any causality of the concepts belonging to rational beings outside it—then what is demanded in the second place is this: that its parts bind themselves into the unity of a whole precisely by being, each toward the other, reciprocally cause and effect of their form. For only in this manner does it become possible that, conversely (reciprocally), the idea of the whole should in its turn determine how all the parts are formed and combined: not in the capacity of a cause—since then the thing would be a product of art—but rather, for whoever appraises it, as the ground of cognition for the systematic unity belonging to the form and joining of all the manifold that the given matter contains.

For a body, then, that is meant to be appraised in itself and by its inner possibility as a natural end, it is requisite that its parts should, all together and in respect of their form as much as their combination, bring one another forth reciprocally and so generate a whole from a causality of their own, the concept of which would in turn, conversely (within a being that possessed a causality according to concepts suited to such a product), be the cause of that same whole according to a principle, so that the connection of efficient causes might at once be appraised as an effect through final causes.

Within such a product of nature every part, in the same way that it is there only through all the others, is likewise conceived as existing for the others' and for the whole's sake, that is, as a tool (organ): which is nevertheless not sufficient (for it might equally be a tool of art and so be represented as possible merely as an end in general); rather, it must be conceived as an organ producing the remaining parts (and thus each one the others reciprocally), of a kind that can be no tool of art but belongs only to the nature that supplies all the material for tools (even those of art): and only then, and for that reason, may a product of this kind—an organized being that organizes itself—receive the name of a natural end.

In a clock one part is the instrument for the movement of the others, but no one wheel is the efficient cause of the production of another; one part is indeed there for the sake of another, yet not through it. Hence the cause that produces the clock and its form is likewise not contained in nature (in this matter) but outside it, in a being that can act according to ideas of a whole made possible through its causality. For this reason, again, one wheel in the clock does not bring about another, and still less does a clock bring forth other clocks by putting other matter to that use (organizing it); nor, accordingly, does it of its own accord make up for the parts stripped away from it, or compensate for a shortcoming in its initial formation through the joining-in of the rest, or set itself to rights, as it were, once it has lapsed into disorder: all of which, on the contrary, we are entitled to look for from organized nature. — An organized being is therefore not merely a machine: for a machine has solely moving power; rather, it possesses within itself formative power, and indeed a power of such a kind that it imparts it to the materials that do not have it (organizing them): thus a self-propagating formative power that cannot be explained by the capacity for motion alone (mechanism).

Of nature and of its power in organized products one says all too little in terming this an analogue of art; for in doing so one pictures the artist (a rational being) as lying beyond it. Rather, nature organizes itself, and in each species of its organized products, according to a single pattern on the whole, yet also with suitable deviations that self-preservation requires as circumstances demand. One draws nearer, perhaps, to this unfathomable property by naming it an analogue of life: but here one must either bestow on matter, taken as mere matter, a property (hylozoism) that runs counter to its very essence; or link to it a principle of foreign kind standing in community with it (namely a soul): yet for this, should such a product be meant to be a product of nature, then one either takes organized matter for granted beforehand as the tool of that soul—so rendering that soul not a whit more intelligible—or else is obliged to turn the soul into the artisan of this edifice, thereby wresting the product away from nature (from the corporeal). Strictly speaking, then, the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality that we know²⁴. Nature's beauty, since it is attributed to objects only in relation to the reflection upon their outer intuition, and hence merely on account of the form of the surface, may with justice be termed an analogue of art. Inner natural perfection, however, of the sort that belongs to those things which are possible solely as natural ends and are for that reason termed organized beings, can, on the analogy of no physical—that is, natural—capacity known to us, and indeed, seeing that we ourselves belong within nature taken in the widest sense, be rendered thinkable and explicable not even through a precisely fitting analogy with human art.

Accordingly, the concept of a thing that is in itself a natural end is no constitutive concept, whether of the understanding or of reason, and yet it may nonetheless function, for the reflecting power of judgment, as a regulative concept, serving—through a distant analogy to our own causality in accordance with ends generally—to guide the inquiry into objects of this sort and to prompt reflection upon their highest ground; this latter aim being, to be sure, directed not toward a knowledge of nature, nor toward that primal ground of it, but rather toward that very practical faculty of reason within us, by analogy with which we had been regarding the cause of that purposiveness.

Organized beings, then, are the sole ones in nature that—even taken by themselves and apart from any relation to other things—must all the same be conceived as possible only as ends of nature, and that are consequently the first to secure objective reality for the concept of an end that is not practical but rather an end of nature, and in this way to furnish natural science with a foundation for a teleology, that is, for a manner of appraising its objects by a special principle—one that, apart from this, it would be flatly unwarranted to bring into it (since the possibility of such a species of causality can in no way be discerned a priori).

§ 66. On the principle for judging the inner purposiveness in organized beings

This principle, which is at once also the definition of such purposiveness, may be stated thus: An organized product of nature is one in which everything is an end and reciprocally also a means. Nothing in it is in vain, purposeless, or attributable to a blind natural mechanism.

True, this principle is, in respect of what prompts it, to be drawn from experience — specifically from the sort that proceeds methodically and goes by the name of observation; but because of the universal and necessary character it predicates of a purposiveness of this kind, it cannot rest on empirical grounds alone, and must instead have some a priori principle as its foundation, even were that principle merely regulative and even were those ends situated solely within the idea of the one judging and nowhere within any operative cause. Accordingly, one may call the aforesaid principle a maxim for appraising, in organized beings, their inner purposiveness.

It is a familiar fact that those who dissect plants and animals — seeking to explore how such beings are built and to comprehend the grounds why and to what end particular parts, why a particular placement and joining of the parts and precisely this inner form, were bestowed on them — hold the maxim that nothing in such a creature is in vain to be inescapably necessary, and press it into service just as much as the principle of general natural science, namely that nothing happens by chance. Indeed, they can renounce this teleological principle just as little as the general physical one, because, just as abandoning the latter would leave no experience whatsoever, so abandoning the former principle would leave behind no guiding thread for observing a species of natural thing that we have once thought teleologically under the concept of natural ends.

For this concept leads reason into an entirely different order of things than the order of a mere natural mechanism, which here will no longer satisfy us. An idea is supposed to lie at the basis of the possibility of the natural product. But since this idea constitutes an absolute unity of the representation, while matter, by contrast, is a manifold of things that on its own can supply no determinate unity of composition: then, should that unity belonging to the idea serve even as the a priori determining ground of a natural law that governs how such a composite form is causally brought about, nature's end has to be extended to everything contained in its product. For once we refer such an effect as a whole to a supersensible determining ground lying beyond nature's blind mechanism, we must also judge it entirely according to this principle; and there is no reason to assume the form of such a thing still to be in part dependent on the latter, since in that case, with the mixing of heterogeneous principles, no secure rule of judging would remain at all.

It may well be that, e.g., in an animal body some parts could be comprehended as concretions according to merely mechanical laws (such as skin, bones, hair). Yet the cause that supplies the matter fit for this, that so modifies and shapes it and sets it down in its proper places, must always be appraised teleologically, so that everything within it has to be viewed as organized, and everything, taken in a certain respect toward the thing itself, is once again an organ too.

§ 67. On the principle for the teleological judging of nature in general, considered as a system of ends

Concerning the external purposiveness of natural things we stated earlier that it affords no adequate warrant for pressing them into service, as ends of nature at once, to explain why they exist, nor for taking their accidentally purposive effects, as conceived in the idea, as reasons for their existence under the principle of final causes. Thus the rivers, because they promote intercourse among peoples in the interior of countries, the mountains, because they contain the sources for these rivers and, for the maintenance of the same, the store of snow for rainless seasons, and likewise the slope of the land, which carries off these waters and lets the ground become dry, are on that account not straightaway to be taken for natural ends: because, although this configuration of the earth's surface was highly necessary for the origination and maintenance of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, it nevertheless has nothing in itself for whose possibility one would find oneself compelled to assume a causality according to ends. The very same holds of plants, which the human being uses for his needs or his enjoyment: of animals, the camel, the ox, the horse, the dog, etc., which he can employ in such manifold ways partly for his nourishment, partly for his service, and for the most part cannot do without at all. In the case of things of which one has no cause to regard any as an end in itself, the external relation can be judged to be purposive only hypothetically.

To judge a thing as a natural end on account of its inner form is something wholly different from holding the existence of this thing to be an end of nature. For this latter claim we need not merely a concept of some possible end, but rather cognition of the final end (scopus) of nature, which demands a relation of the same to something supersensible that far outstrips all our teleological cognition of nature; for the end of nature's own existence must be sought beyond nature. The inner form of a mere blade of grass can sufficiently establish, for our human faculty of judging, that its origin is possible solely under the rule of ends. But if one departs from this and looks only at the use that other natural beings make of it, thus abandoning the consideration of the inner organization and attending only to external purposive relations—how the grass is needed by cattle, how these are needed by the human being as a means to his existence—and one does not see why it should be necessary that human beings exist (which, if one has in mind, say, the New Hollanders or the Fuegians, might not so easily be answered): then one arrives at no categorical end, but rather all this purposive relation rests on a condition that must always be set ever further back, a condition that, as unconditioned (the existence of a thing as final end), lies wholly outside the physico-teleological consideration of the world. But then such a thing fails to be a natural end as well; for it (or indeed its entire species) cannot count as a product of nature.

Therefore nothing but matter, so far as it is organized, of necessity brings the concept of itself as a natural end in its train, since this, its specific form, is at once nature's own product. This concept, however, now carries us necessarily onward to the idea of nature in its totality as a single system built on the rule of ends—an idea beneath which nature's entire mechanism must from now on be subordinated in accordance with principles of reason (at least so as to test the appearance of nature against it). Reason's principle pertains to it only as something subjective, i.e., as a maxim: everything in the world is good for something or other; nothing in it is in vain; and one is entitled, indeed called upon, by the example that nature gives in its organic products, to expect from it and its laws nothing but what is purposive on the whole.

It is self-evident that this serves as a principle belonging not to the determining but solely to the reflecting power of judgment, that its role is regulative rather than constitutive, and that it thereby furnishes us with nothing more than a guiding clue for viewing natural things—in their bearing on a ground of determination already at hand—under a new order of law, and for broadening natural science by a further principle, namely that of final causes, though this leaves wholly intact the principle of its causal mechanism. For the rest, this in no way settles whether anything that we judge according to this principle is intentionally an end of nature: whether the grasses exist for the sake of the ox or the sheep, and whether these and the remaining natural things exist for the sake of the human being. It is good to consider even those things that are disagreeable to us and contrary to purpose in particular relations from this side as well. One might say, for instance: the vermin that torment people in their clothing, their hair, or their bedsteads are, according to a wise provision of nature, a spur toward cleanliness, which on its own already counts as an important means whereby health is preserved. Or, again, the mosquitoes together with other stinging insects, which render the deserts of America so burdensome to the savages, count as so many prods to industry for these fledgling human beings, driving them to drain the swamps, to clear the dense forests that shut out the current of air, and thereby—along with the tilling of the soil—to render their dwelling-place healthier at once. Even what appears to run counter to nature in the human being's inner organization, when handled in this manner, affords an entertaining and at times also instructive glimpse into a teleological ordering of things—one to which mere physical observation, lacking such a principle, would not by itself lead us. Just as some judge the tapeworm to have been given to the human being or the animal in which it dwells as it were to compensate for a certain deficiency of its vital organs, so I would ask whether dreams (without which sleep never occurs, even though we but seldom remember them) might not be a purposive arrangement of nature, in that, namely, during the relaxation of all the bodily moving forces, they serve to move the vital organs most inwardly by means of the imagination and its great busyness (which in this state mostly rises to the level of affect); just as they also, when the stomach is overfilled, where this movement is all the more necessary, commonly play in the night's sleep with all the more liveliness; so that consequently, without this inwardly moving force and wearying unrest, of which we accuse dreams (which are yet in fact perhaps remedies), sleep even in a healthy condition would probably be a complete extinction of life.

Beauty in nature, too—i.e., its agreement, in the apprehension and appraisal of its appearance, with the free play of our powers of cognition—can in this fashion be viewed as an objective purposiveness belonging to nature as one whole, a system wherein the human being stands as a member: provided the teleological judging of nature, through those natural ends which organized beings put into our hands, has once warranted for us the idea of one great system embracing nature's ends. We can regard it as a favor²⁵ that nature has shown us that, over and above the useful, it dispensed beauty and charms so abundantly, and can love it on that account, just as we can regard it with respect on account of its immeasurability and, in this contemplation, feel ourselves ennobled: exactly as if nature had, quite properly with this intention, set up and adorned its magnificent stage.

In this § we intend to assert nothing beyond this: that, having once detected in nature a power to bring forth products conceivable by us solely under the concept of final causes, we then press on and are entitled to count as belonging to a system of ends even those products which—or whose relation, purposive though it be —do not strictly oblige us to look, over and above the mechanism of blindly acting causes, for some further principle of their possibility: for that first idea already, as regards its ground, carries us out past the sensible world; since the unity of the supersensible principle must count as valid in one and the same way not only for certain species of natural being, but equally for the entirety of nature as a system.

§ 68. On the principle of teleology as an internal principle of natural science

A science's principles are either intrinsic to it, in which case they are termed native (principia domestica), or else they are grounded in concepts that can have their place only outside it, and are foreign principles (peregrina). Those sciences which contain principles of the latter kind set lemmas (Lemmata) at the foundation of their teachings; that is, from another science they take on loan some concept, and along with it a ground for ordering their material.

Each science is, taken on its own, a system, and it does not suffice to build within it according to principles and so to proceed technically; rather, one must go to work architectonically with it too, as with an edifice standing on its own, treating it not as an annex and a portion of some other building, but as a whole in its own right, even if afterward one can establish a passage from the one into the other, or reciprocally.

If, then, for the sake of natural science and within its context one imports the concept of God, so as to render the purposiveness in nature explicable to oneself, and then afterward has recourse to this very purposiveness in order to prove that a God exists, then neither of the two sciences possesses any inner stability, and a deceptive diallelon casts each into uncertainty by letting their respective boundaries run together into one another.

The expression "an end of nature" already guards well enough against this confusion, keeping natural science, and the occasion it affords for the teleological judging of its objects, from being blended with the contemplation of God and thus with a theological derivation; and one ought not to treat it as a matter of indifference whether one exchanges that expression for that of a divine end in the arrangement of nature, or indeed passes the latter off as more seemly and better befitting a devout soul, on the ground that in the end it must after all come down to tracing those purposive forms of nature back to a wise originator of the world; one must instead confine oneself carefully and modestly to the expression that states precisely no more than what we know, namely an end of nature. For even before we inquire into the cause of nature itself, we already come upon, within nature and in the course of its production, products of the sort that arise in it under familiar empirical laws—laws under which natural science is to judge its objects, and consequently must also seek their causality, following the rule of ends, within nature itself. It must therefore not overleap its boundary so as to draw into itself, as a native principle, that for whose concept no experience whatever could be adequate, and upon which one is warranted in venturing only once natural science has been brought to completion.

Natural constitutions that admit of a priori demonstration, and whose possibility can therefore be grasped from universal principles without any recourse to experience, cannot—although they carry a technical purposiveness with them—for that very reason, because they are wholly necessary, be reckoned at all as part of the teleology of nature, taken as a method, proper to physics, for resolving the latter's questions. Arithmetical and geometrical analogies, together with the universal laws of mechanics—however much the combining, under one principle, of several rules that on their face seem wholly unconnected to one another may strike us in them as odd and worthy of wonder—make no claim on that ground to count as teleological grounds of explanation in physics; and although they do deserve to be brought into the reckoning within the general theory of the purposiveness of natural things as such, that theory would still belong somewhere else, namely to metaphysics, and would constitute no internal principle of natural science: as, by contrast, in the case of the empirical laws governing ends of nature in organized beings, it is not only permitted but indeed inescapable to employ the teleological manner of judging as a principle of the doctrine of nature with respect to a distinct class of its objects.

Now, so that physics may keep itself strictly within its own bounds, it leaves entirely aside the question of whether nature's ends are intentional or unintentional; for to take that up would be to meddle in a business not its own (that, namely, of metaphysics). Suffice it that they are objects which, solely and exclusively under natural laws that we can think, as a principle, only under the idea of ends, are explicable, and which, in this way alone and in respect of their inner form, are even only inwardly knowable. Accordingly, in order not to fall under the least suspicion of arrogance—as though one wished to blend into our grounds of cognition something that in no way belongs to physics, namely a supernatural cause—one indeed speaks in teleology of nature as if the purposiveness within it were intended, yet always in such a way that it is to nature, that is, to matter, that one ascribes this intent; and by this (since no misunderstanding is here possible, seeing that of itself no one would ascribe intent, in the proper sense of the word, to lifeless material) one wishes to indicate that this word, in the present case, signifies nothing more than a principle of the reflecting rather than the determining power of judgment, and is therefore meant to introduce no special ground of causality, but merely to add, for reason's own use, a mode of inquiry other than the one proceeding by mechanical laws, thereby supplying what these last leave wanting even in the empirical tracing of every particular law of nature. This is why, in teleology, insofar as it is enlisted for physics, one may speak quite properly of the wisdom, the frugality, the providence, the benevolence of nature, without thereby turning it into an intelligent being (for that would be preposterous), yet also without making bold to want to install some other, intelligent being above it as its master builder, since to do so would be presumptuous²⁶ ; rather, what is thereby designated is merely a kind of causality of nature, by analogy with our own in the technical employment of reason, so as to keep in view the rule by which certain of nature's products are to be pursued in inquiry.

But why, then, does teleology ordinarily not form a distinct part of theoretical natural science, and is instead annexed to theology as a propaedeutic or a transition? This comes about in order to keep the

study of nature according to its mechanism tied to whatever we can so submit to our observation or to experiments that we could ourselves bring it about, in the manner of nature, at least in the resemblance of the laws; for one gains complete insight only into so much as one can oneself fashion and accomplish according to concepts. Organization, on the other hand, as an internal end of nature, surpasses beyond all measure every power to furnish a like presentation by art; and where the outer contrivances of nature that are taken to be purposive are concerned (winds, rain, and the like, for instance), physics may well look into their mechanism, yet their relation to ends—so far as such a relation is meant to be a condition necessarily belonging to the cause—it can in no way exhibit, because this necessity of the connection concerns wholly the joining of our concepts and not the character of the things themselves.

Second Division. Dialectic of the teleological power of judgment

§ 69. What an antinomy of the power of judgment is

Of itself the determining power of judgment possesses no principles by which concepts of objects might be founded. It amounts to no autonomy, since all it does is subsume things beneath laws, or concepts, that are already given and function as its principles. For just this reason it too runs no risk of an antinomy of its own, nor of any conflict among its principles. Likewise the transcendental power of judgment, whose task consisted in subsuming the conditions under categories, was in itself not nomothetic; rather it merely specified those conditions of sensible intuition beneath which a given concept, taken as a law of the understanding, can be granted reality (application): a matter over which it could never fall out with itself (in respect of its principles, at any rate).

The reflecting power of judgment, however, is required to subsume under a law that has not yet been given, and which is therefore really nothing more than a principle for reflecting on objects for which, from the objective side, we are wholly without a law, or without any concept of the object adequate to serve as a principle for the cases as they occur. Now since no employment of the cognitive faculties may be granted without principles, the reflecting power of judgment will, in such cases, have to become a principle to itself: and this principle, inasmuch as it is not objective and can furnish, for the intended purpose, no adequate ground of cognition of the object, is to function as a merely subjective principle governing the purposive use of the cognitive faculties, namely for reflecting upon a certain sort of objects. Thus, with regard to cases of that kind, the reflecting power of judgment does have maxims — indeed necessary ones — for the purpose of cognizing the laws of nature in experience, in order by their means to arrive at concepts, even should these be concepts of reason, whenever it stands wholly in need of such in order merely to acquaint itself with nature in accordance with its empirical laws. — Between these necessary maxims belonging to the reflecting power of judgment a conflict may now arise, and hence an antinomy, upon which a dialectic is grounded; and this dialectic, should each of two mutually conflicting maxims have its ground in the nature of the cognitive faculties, may be termed a natural one, bound up with an unavoidable semblance which criticism must expose and dissolve, lest it deceive us.

§ 70. Representation of this antinomy

So far as reason is concerned with nature as the totality of the objects of the outer senses, it may rest upon laws which the understanding in part lays down for nature a priori of its own accord, and in part can extend beyond all foreseeable bounds by means of the empirical determinations that turn up in experience. In applying the first sort of laws — namely the universal ones of material nature at large — the power of judgment stands in need of no special principle of reflection; for there it is determining, the understanding having furnished it with an objective principle. But as concerns the particular laws, which can be made known to us only through experience, there can be among them so great a manifoldness and heterogeneity that the power of judgment must serve as a principle to itself merely in order to search out and track down a law even in the appearances of nature, since it requires such a law as a guiding thread if it is so much as to hope for a coherent cognition from experience in accordance with a thoroughgoing lawfulness of nature, the unity of that nature under empirical laws. Given this contingent unity of the particular laws, it can now come about: that in its reflection the power of judgment sets out from two maxims, one of which the mere understanding hands to it a priori; while the other is prompted by particular experiences that bring reason into play, so as to conduct the judging of corporeal nature and its laws according to a special principle. And here it comes about that these two sorts of maxims seem hardly able to coexist side by side, whereby a dialectic breaks out that throws the power of judgment into confusion as to the principle of its reflection.

The first maxim belonging to it is the thesis: The whole generation of material things, and of their forms too, must be appraised as possible according to merely mechanical laws.

The second maxim is the antithesis: Some products of material nature cannot be judged possible under mechanical laws taken alone (their judging demands an altogether different law of causality, namely that of final causes).

Suppose that one now recast these regulative fundamental principles of inquiry into constitutive ones bearing on the possibility of the objects themselves; then they would be worded thus:

Thesis: Under merely mechanical laws, all generation of material things is possible.

Antithesis: Some generation of them is not possible under mechanical laws alone.

Taken in this latter capacity — as objective principles governing the determining power of judgment — the two would stand in mutual contradiction, whence one of the pair of propositions would have to be false; yet what resulted would indeed be an antinomy, not, however, of the power of judgment, but a conflict within reason's own legislation. Reason, however, can demonstrate neither of these two principles: for we can possess no a priori determining principle for the possibility of things according to merely empirical laws of nature.

As for the maxim of a reflecting power of judgment set out first, by contrast, it in fact contains no contradiction whatsoever. For when I say: I must judge all occurrences in material nature, and hence all forms too, as products of it with respect to their possibility, according to purely mechanical laws, I am not thereby saying: they are, on that basis alone (to the exclusion of every other kind of causality), possible; rather it is only meant to indicate this: that I ought always, in accordance with the principle of nature's mere mechanism, to reflect upon them, and thus to pursue this mechanism as far as I can, because, without laying it at the basis of inquiry, there can be no proper cognition of nature whatever. This, now, does not prevent the second maxim, on occasional prompting — namely in the case of certain natural forms (and on their prompting even of the whole of nature) — from tracking, according to a principle, and reflecting upon them by a principle wholly distinct from explanation by nature's mechanism, namely the principle of final causes. For the reflection according to the first maxim is not thereby annulled; on the contrary, it is enjoined that one pursue it as far as one can; nor is it thereby said that those forms would be impossible under the mechanism of nature. What is asserted is merely this: that human reason, by keeping to this maxim and proceeding thus, will at no point light upon the slightest ground for whatever constitutes the peculiar mark of a natural end, whereas it will assuredly turn up other cognitions concerning natural laws; and here it is left an open question whether, within the inner ground of nature itself — hidden from us — the physical-mechanical linkage and the linkage of ends may not, in one and the same things, hold together under a single principle: save that our reason is unable to combine them under any such principle, and the power of judgment, accordingly — as reflecting (from a subjective ground), and not as a determining power of judgment (answering to an objective principle that governs the possibility of things in themselves) — finds itself constrained to conceive, for certain natural forms, a ground of their possibility in some principle other than that of nature's mechanism.

§ 71. Preparation for the resolution of the above antinomy

That organized natural products could never arise through nature's mere mechanism is something we are wholly unable to demonstrate, since the boundless variety of the particular natural laws — contingent for us because they are cognized only empirically — cannot be grasped by us as to its first inner ground, and thus the inner, everywhere adequate principle of the possibility of a nature, one that resides in the supersensible, remains utterly beyond our reach. Hence whether nature's productive power extends just as far to what we judge to be shaped or linked according to the idea of ends as it does to that for which we believe a mere machinery of nature suffices; and whether in fact, for things taken as genuine natural ends (as we are bound to judge them), an entirely different sort of original causality — one that could not possibly reside within material nature or within its intelligible substrate, namely an architectonic understanding — lies at the basis of them: about all this our reason, so narrowly restricted where the concept of causality is concerned, once that concept is to be specified a priori, can yield no information whatever. — But that, in relation to our faculty of cognition, the mere mechanism of nature can likewise supply no ground of explanation for the generation of organized beings is just as indubitably certain. For the reflecting power of judgment, accordingly, the following holds as a perfectly sound principle: that, to account for so evident a linkage of things in terms of final causes, one must conceive a causality differing from mechanism — namely that of a world-cause which acts according to ends, and so acts intelligently; hasty and indemonstrable though such a principle would be for the determining one. In the former case it amounts to nothing more than a maxim of the power of judgment, the concept of that causality being here a mere idea, one to which no one undertakes to grant reality, employing it solely as a thread to guide reflection — a reflection that all the while remains open to every mechanical ground of explanation and never strays from the world of sense; in the latter case, by contrast, the principle would become an objective one, prescribed by reason, to which the power of judgment would have to submit as determining, yet whereby it ventures past the world of sense into the transcendent and is perhaps led astray.

The whole appearance of an antinomy between the maxims of the properly physical (mechanical) and the teleological (technical) way of explaining thus rests upon this: that a principle of the reflecting power of judgment is confused with one of the determining, and the autonomy of the former — which holds good only subjectively, for our employment of reason with respect to the particular laws of experience — with the heteronomy of the other, obliged as it is to accord with the general or particular laws laid down by the understanding.

§ 72. On the various systems concerning the purposiveness of nature

No one has as yet cast doubt on the correctness of the basic proposition that certain natural things (organized beings), along with their possibility, must be judged in accordance with the concept of final causes — and this holds even when, so as to learn their constitution through observation, one demands a guiding thread, without presuming to rise to an inquiry into their first origin. Thus the only remaining question is this: whether such a principle holds good in a merely subjective way — that is, whether it counts simply as a maxim of our power of judgment — or whether instead it constitutes an objective principle of nature, one by which, beyond her mechanism (governed by bare laws of motion), a causality of yet another sort belongs to her, that of final causes, beneath which the aforesaid moving forces would rank as no more than intermediate causes.

For speculation, then, this question or problem might be left wholly unsettled and open: since, provided we rest content with the latter inside the limits of mere cognition of nature, we possess in those maxims all that is needed to study nature — as far indeed as human powers reach — and to hunt out her most deeply concealed mysteries. It is therefore surely a certain intimation of our reason, or as it were a hint given to us by nature, that by means of that concept of final causes we might indeed reach out beyond nature and even link nature itself to the supreme point within the whole causal series, were we to give up the inquiry into nature (little though we have as yet advanced in it), or at least were to suspend it for a while and first try to find out where that stranger in natural science, namely the concept of natural ends, might lead.

At this point, admittedly, that undisputed maxim would have to give way to a problem that throws open a broad arena for controversy: whether, within nature, the linkage of ends proves for her a causality of a peculiar sort; or whether, taken on its own and viewed under objective principles, it is not rather identical with nature's mechanism, or grounded in one and the very same basis — save only that we, because in many products of nature this basis lies buried too deep for our investigation, resort to a subjective principle, namely that of art, i.e., of a causality operating by ideas, so as to place it under nature by way of analogy; and although this makeshift aid succeeds for us in many instances, and in some admittedly appears to fail, in no case does it authorize us to bring into natural science a distinct mode of efficacy, one set apart from the causality that follows the merely mechanical laws of nature herself. Inasmuch as we give the name of technique to nature's procedure (its causality), owing to the end-resembling quality we come upon in her products, we shall sort this technique into the intentional (technica intentionalis) and the unintentional (technica naturalis). By the first is meant this: that nature's productive power operating through final causes has to be taken for a special species of causality; by the second: that it is at bottom entirely the same as nature's mechanism, and that its fortuitous agreement with our concepts of art and the rules thereof — a merely subjective condition for appraising it — comes to be wrongly interpreted as a peculiar mode of natural production.

When we now discuss the systems for explaining nature in respect of final causes, it must be carefully noted: that they are one and all in dispute with one another dogmatically, i.e., over objective principles concerning the possibility of things — be it through causes acting intentionally or purely unintentionally, but not, say, over the subjective maxim of merely judging about the cause of such purposive products: in which latter case disparate principles could still well be united, whereas in the former contradictorily opposed ones cancel one another out and cannot subsist alongside one another.

As concerns the technique of nature — that is, her productive power following the rule of ends — the systems fall into two kinds: that of the idealism, or that of the realism, of natural ends. The one holds that the whole purposiveness of nature is unintentional; the other, that a portion of it (in organized beings) is intentional — whence, indeed, one could draw the further inference, established as a hypothesis, that nature's technique is likewise intentional, i.e., an end, with respect as well to every one of her remaining products in their bearing on nature as a whole.

1) Now the idealism of purposiveness (throughout, I always understand the objective kind) is either that of the casuality or that of the fatality by which nature is determined in the purposive form her products take. This former principle bears upon how matter stands to the physical basis of its form, that is, upon the laws of motion; the latter, upon the hyperphysical basis of matter and of nature taken in its whole extent. The system of casuality, which is attributed to Epicurus or Democritus, is — taken literally — so patently absurd that we need not dwell upon it; the system of fatality, by contrast (of which Spinoza is made the author, though to all appearances it is much older), which appeals to something supersensible, to which therefore our insight does not reach, is not so easily refuted: precisely because its concept of the original being cannot be understood at all. Yet this much stands clear: that within such a system the world's connection of ends has to be taken as unintentional (for it is drawn from an original being — though not from that being's understanding, and thus from no intention of its own, but rather out of the necessity of its nature and the unity of the world descending therefrom), and hence the fatalism of purposiveness is simultaneously an idealism of it.

2) The realism of nature's purposiveness is, again, either physical or hyperphysical. The first grounds the ends in nature on the analogue of a capacity acting according to intention, on the life of matter (within it, or else through an animating inner principle, a world-soul), and it goes by the name of hylozoism. The second traces them back to the primordial ground of the cosmos, viewed as an intelligent being that brings them forth with intention (and that is originally living), and it is theism.²⁷

§ 73. None of the above systems achieves what it purports to

What is it that all those systems want? Their intent is to account for our teleological judgments regarding nature, and in doing so they proceed such that one side disputes the truth of those judgments, and thus takes them for an idealism of nature (conceived as art), whereas the other side acknowledges them as true and undertakes to establish that a nature answering to the idea of final causes is possible.

1) On the one side, those systems that take up the cause of the idealism of final causes in nature do indeed grant, at their principle, a causality governed by laws of motion (whereby natural things come to exist in a purposive way); but what they refuse to it is intentionality, that is, they refuse to grant that it is purposely directed toward bringing forth those purposive products of theirs, or, in other words, that an end serves as the cause. This is Epicurus's mode of explanation, according to which the distinction between a technique of nature and mere mechanism is entirely disavowed, and blind chance is taken as the ground of explanation not merely for the agreement of the products brought forth with our concepts of an end — hence for the technique — but even for the determination of the causes of this production according to laws of motion, hence for its mechanism; so that nothing at all, not even the semblance in our teleological judgment, is explained, and consequently the alleged idealism therein is by no means established.

Spinoza, on his side, would spare us every question as to the ground on which the ends of nature are possible, and would deprive this idea of all reality, in that he lets them pass not for products whatsoever but for accidents that inhere in an original being, and assigns to that being — as the substrate underlying those natural things — no causality but bare subsistence in regard to them, and (since this being, taken together with all natural things, which are accidents that inhere in it, carries unconditioned necessity) he does secure for the natural forms that unity of ground which all purposiveness demands, yet at the same moment tears away their contingency, apart from which no unity of ends is thinkable, and with it everything intentional, just as he withdraws all understanding from the primordial ground of natural things.

But Spinozism does not achieve what it wants. It wants to specify a ground of explanation for the purposive connection (which it does not deny) among the things of nature, yet it merely cites the unity of the subject wherein they all inhere. Yet even if, for the beings of the world, one concedes to it this mode of existing as well, that ontological unity is still not thereby at once a unity of ends, nor does it render such a unity in the least comprehensible. This last, namely, is an altogether peculiar kind of it, one which by no means arises from the linkage of things (beings of the world) within a single subject (the original being), but instead invariably brings with itself a bearing upon a cause endowed with understanding, and even were all these things gathered into one simple subject, it would nonetheless yield no purposive relation whatever: not unless one conceives them, in the first place, as inner effects of the substance regarded as a cause, and, in the second, that same substance as a cause operating through its understanding. Lacking such formal conditions, every unity amounts to nothing but a natural necessity; and where it is ascribed all the same to things that we represent as lying apart from one another, it becomes a blind necessity. But should one choose to give the name of purposiveness of nature to that which the School designates the transcendental perfection of things (with respect to their own essence) — the perfection on which all things possess within themselves whatever is demanded for their being just this thing and none other —: then what results is a childish trifling with words rather than concepts. For should all things have to be conceived as ends, so that to be a thing and to be an end come to the same, then fundamentally nothing remains that would merit being represented as an end in any special sense.

One readily gathers from this: that Spinoza, in leading our concepts of what is purposive in nature back to the awareness we have of ourselves in an all-comprising (though at once simple) being, and in looking for that form solely within the unity of this latter being, was bound to have as his aim the assertion, not of the realism, but only of the idealism of their purposiveness, though he could not actually bring even this about himself, since the mere representation of the substrate's unity cannot call forth so much as the idea of a purposiveness that is even merely unintentional.

2) Those who do not merely maintain the realism of natural ends but fancy that they can explain it as well suppose themselves able to grasp, at least so far as its possibility goes, a peculiar sort of causality — that, namely, of causes that act with intention; for otherwise they could not set about wishing to explain them. For even to be entitled to the boldest hypothesis, the possibility of what one assumes as a ground must at least be certain, and one must be able to secure objective reality for the concept of it.

But the possibility of a living matter (whose concept contains a contradiction, since lifelessness, inertia, constitutes its essential character) cannot even be thought; that of a matter which is animated, and of nature in its entirety as an animal, admits of only a scanty use (on behalf of a hypothesis of purposiveness in nature at large), namely insofar as such organization on the small scale discloses itself to us in experience, whereas it can in no way be grasped a priori with respect to its possibility. One is thus forced into a circle in the explaining, whenever one would trace the purposiveness of nature in organized beings back to the life of matter, and yet is acquainted with this life in no other way than within organized beings, so that, lacking experience of that kind, one can frame no concept of its possibility. Hylozoism, therefore, does not achieve what it promises.

Theism, in the end, can no better furnish a dogmatic grounding for the possibility of natural ends that would serve as a key to teleology; even though, among all the grounds of explanation for it, this one holds the advantage that, through an understanding it attributes to the original being, it most successfully wrests the purposiveness of nature away from idealism and brings in a deliberate causality for the production of that nature.

For here it would first of all have to be proved, sufficiently for the determining power of judgment, that the unity of ends in matter is impossible through the mere mechanism of matter, in order to be entitled to posit the ground of that unity, in a determinate manner, beyond nature. Yet we are able to elicit nothing beyond this: that, in keeping with the makeup and the bounds of our cognitive faculties (since we fail to discern the primary, inner ground of this very mechanism), we are in no manner obliged to look within matter for a principle of determinate purposive relations, and that no other manner of appraising the generation of its products as natural ends is left to us save that which proceeds through a supreme understanding as world-cause. But this furnishes a ground solely for the reflecting power of judgment, not for the determining one, and can under no circumstances warrant any objective assertion.

§ 74. The reason it is impossible to treat the concept of a technic of nature dogmatically is the inexplicability of a natural end

We treat a concept dogmatically (even if it should happen to be empirically conditioned) whenever we regard it as contained under some other concept of the object—one that forms a principle of reason—and specify it to accord with that higher one. By contrast, we handle it merely critically when we view it solely in reference to our faculty of cognition—and thus to the subjective conditions under which we think it—while making no attempt to settle anything regarding its object. The dogmatic procedure with a concept is thus the one that is lawful for the determining power of judgment, the critical the one lawful merely for the reflecting.

Now the concept of a thing understood as a natural end is one that brings nature under a causality conceivable solely by reason, so as to appraise, on that principle, whatever is given of the object in experience. But to employ it dogmatically on behalf of the determining power of judgment, we should have to be assured beforehand of this concept's objective reality, for otherwise we could subsume no natural thing under it. The concept of a natural end, however, though empirically conditioned—that is, possible only under certain conditions furnished in experience—is nonetheless not one to be abstracted from experience, but one possible solely by a principle of reason in the judging of the object. As such a principle, then, it can in no way be grasped and dogmatically established as regards its objective reality (that is, that an object conforming to it be possible); and it remains unknown to us whether it is a merely sophistical and objectively vacuous concept (conceptus ratiocinans), or a concept of reason—one that founds a cognition and is confirmed by reason—(conceptus ratiocinatus). It cannot, therefore, be treated dogmatically for the determining power of judgment: that is, not only can it not be made out whether things of nature, regarded as natural ends, demand for their production a causality of an altogether special kind (the one directed by intentions) or not; the question cannot so much as be posed, since the concept of a natural end is, as regards its objective reality, in no way provable through reason (that is to say, it is not constitutive for the determining power of judgment, but for the reflecting merely regulative).

That it is not such, however, is clear from this: that, as the concept of a natural product, it comprehends within itself natural necessity and, at the same time, in that very same thing regarded as an end, a contingency in the object's form (with respect to mere natural laws); consequently, if contradiction is to be avoided here, the concept must include both a basis for the thing's possibility within nature and, in addition, a basis for the possibility of this very nature itself, together with its relation to something that is not empirically knowable nature (the supersensible), and hence not cognizable by us at all, so that it may be judged under a species of causality other than the mechanism of nature, should one seek to make out its possibility. Since, therefore, the concept of a thing as a natural end is for the determining power of judgment overreaching when one regards the object by means of reason (although it may well be immanent for the reflecting power of judgment in view of the objects of experience), so that its objective reality cannot be furnished to it for determining judgments: from this it becomes conceivable why none of the systems that one might ever sketch for handling dogmatically the concept of natural ends and of nature—taken as a whole bound together by final causes—can decide anything whatever, neither by objective affirmation nor by objective denial; for once things get subsumed beneath a concept that is no more than problematic, that concept's synthetic predicates (for instance here: whether the natural end we conceive for the production of the things is intended or not) must yield judgments of precisely that same (problematic) kind about the object, whether they turn out affirmative or negative, given that one cannot tell whether one's judgment bears on something or on nothing. The concept of a causality operating through ends (that of art) certainly possesses objective reality, as does the concept of a causality proceeding by nature's mechanism. The concept of a natural causality following the rule of ends, however—and still more that of a being of a kind that can never be given to us in experience, namely such a being as the original ground of nature—can indeed be thought without contradiction, yet remains unfit for dogmatic determinations: for since it can neither be drawn from experience nor is needed for the possibility of experience, its objective reality can be secured by nothing whatever. And even were this to occur, how could I reckon things expressly declared to be products of divine art still among the products of nature, whose incapacity to bring forth such things by their own laws was precisely what made the appeal to a cause distinct from it necessary?

§ 75. The concept of nature's objective purposiveness is a critical principle of reason for the reflecting power of judgment

It makes a considerable difference, after all, whether I say: certain things of nature, or indeed nature in its entirety, can be brought forth only by a cause that resolves upon action in accordance with intentions; or whether I hold that, given the peculiar constitution of my cognitive faculties, I am unable to judge the possibility of those things and their production otherwise than by supposing for it a cause that operates according to intentions, and thus a being whose productivity is modeled on the causality proper to an understanding. In the former case I aim to decide something regarding the object and am obliged to exhibit the objective reality of a concept I have adopted; in the latter, reason does no more than regulate the employment of my cognitive faculties in keeping with their peculiar character and with the essential conditions governing both their extent and their bounds. Thus the first principle is an objective principle for the determining power of judgment, the second a subjective principle merely for the reflecting power of judgment, and hence a maxim of the latter that reason imposes upon it.

For we find it indispensable to place the concept of an intention beneath nature if we wish to investigate it, even only in its organized products, through sustained observation; and so this concept is already, for the empirical employment of our reason, an utterly necessary maxim. It is evident that, once such a guiding thread for studying nature has been adopted and found to hold good, we must at least try the aforesaid maxim of the power of judgment on nature as a whole too, since by following it a number of further laws of nature might well be brought to light that, given the narrowness of our insight into the inner workings of nature's mechanism, would otherwise stay hidden from us. As regards this second use, however, that maxim of the power of judgment, though useful, is not something we cannot do without, since nature taken as a whole is never presented to us as organized (in the narrowest meaning of the term noted earlier). When it comes to nature's products, by contrast — which have to be assessed as deliberately formed in this way and no other if one is to gain even an experiential cognition of their inner makeup — that maxim of the reflecting power of judgment is indispensable in essence: for it is not so much as possible to conceive of them as organized things unless one binds to that conception the idea of a production carried out with intention.

Now the concept of a thing the existence or form of which we picture to ourselves as possible under the condition of an end is inseparably connected with the concept of that thing's contingency (according to natural laws). Hence the natural things that strike us as possible solely as ends furnish the chief evidence that the world as a whole is contingent, and they alone supply the ground of proof — one that holds for common understanding no less than for the philosopher — for that whole's dependence upon, and derivation from, a being that exists beyond the world and (on account of that purposive form) is intelligent: with the result that teleology can bring its inquiries to no complete resolution except within a theology.

But what, in the end, does even the most complete teleology prove? Does it perhaps prove that such an intelligent being exists? No; nothing more than that, given the constitution of our cognitive faculties — that is, in linking experience to the supreme principles of reason — we can frame no concept whatsoever of how such a world is possible, save by conceiving for it an intentionally acting supreme cause. Objectively, therefore, we are unable to establish the proposition that an intelligent original being exists; we can do so only subjectively, on behalf of how our power of judgment is employed as it reflects on those ends within nature — ends that admit of being thought under no principle other than one of intentional causality exercised by a supreme cause.

Should we attempt to prove the supreme proposition dogmatically, drawing on teleological grounds, we would find ourselves caught up in perplexities out of which there would be no disentangling ourselves. For in that event such conclusions would need to be founded on the following claim: organized beings in the world can be possible in no other manner than through an intentionally acting cause. But that, because we can pursue these things in their causal connection only under the idea of ends and can cognize that connection according to its conformity to law, we would thereby also be entitled to presuppose the very same thing for every thinking and cognizing being as a necessary condition — one attaching, therefore, to the object and not merely to our subject: this is what we would here inevitably have to want to assert. But with an assertion of this sort we make no headway. For since we do not really observe the ends in nature as intentional, but only, in reflecting upon its products, think this concept into them as a guiding thread for the power of judgment, they are not given to us through the object. A priori it is even impossible for us to justify such a concept, as regards its objective reality, as admissible. It therefore remains, absolutely, a proposition resting solely on subjective conditions — namely, on the power of judgment reflecting in a manner suited to our cognitive faculties — a proposition that, were one to express it as holding objectively and dogmatically, would run: There is a God; whereas now, for us human beings, only the restricted formula is permitted: We cannot in any way think and render intelligible to ourselves the purposiveness that must be laid at the ground even of our cognition of the inner possibility of many things of nature, except by representing them, and the world in general, to ourselves as a product of an intelligent cause (of a God).

Now if this proposition, resting as it does on an unavoidably necessary maxim of our power of judgment, fully satisfies every speculative as well as practical use of our reason in any human aim whatever: then I would gladly know what it is we forfeit in not being able to demonstrate it as holding for higher beings too — namely, from purely objective grounds (which, unfortunately, surpass our capacity). For it is quite certain that, on merely mechanical principles of nature, we can neither adequately acquaint ourselves with organized beings and their inner possibility nor, far less, account for them to ourselves; so certain, indeed, that one may say without hesitation: it is preposterous for human beings even to conceive such an undertaking, or to entertain the hope that one day some Newton might arise capable of rendering intelligible the generation of so much as a blade of grass by natural laws set in order by no intention at all; on the contrary, one must simply refuse human beings any such insight. But that in nature, too, supposing we could penetrate to its principle in the specification of its general laws known to us, a sufficient ground for the possibility of organized beings — without placing an intention beneath their production (that is, within nature's bare mechanism) — could not possibly lie hidden: this again would be far too presumptuous a judgment on our part; for how are we to know that? Probabilities fall away entirely here, where what is at stake are judgments of pure reason. — Thus, concerning the proposition whether a being acting according to intentions lies, as world-cause (and hence as author), at the ground of what we rightly call natural ends, we can pass no objective judgment at all, neither affirmative nor negative; only this much is certain, that if we are nonetheless to judge at least by what our own nature permits us to grasp (by the conditions and limits of our reason), we can place absolutely nothing other than an intelligent being at the ground of the possibility of those natural ends: which alone accords with the maxim of our reflecting power of judgment, and hence with a ground that is subjective, yet inseparably attaching to the human species.

§ 76. Remark

This consideration, which very much deserves to be carried out at length within transcendental philosophy, may here be introduced only in passing, by way of clarification (not as a proof of what has been set forth here).

As a faculty of principles, reason presses in its furthest demand toward the unconditioned, while the understanding, by contrast, is only ever of service to it under some given condition that has to be supplied. Without concepts of the understanding, however, to which objective reality must be given, reason cannot judge objectively (synthetically) at all, and as theoretical reason it contains, taken by itself, absolutely no constitutive but merely regulative principles. One soon becomes aware: that, where the understanding cannot follow, reason becomes extravagant and comes forward with ideas that are indeed well-founded (as regulative principles) but not with objectively valid concepts; the understanding, however, which cannot keep step with it, yet which would be needed for validity with respect to objects, restricts the validity of those ideas of reason to the subject alone, though universally for all beings of this kind, i.e., to the condition that, in accordance with the nature of our (human) faculty of cognition, or indeed generally in accordance with the concept that we can form for ourselves of the faculty of a finite rational being as such, it can and must be thought in no way other than this: yet without thereby maintaining that the ground of such a judgment lies in the object. We shall adduce examples that admittedly carry too much importance and also too much difficulty to be forced upon the reader here straightaway as proven propositions, but which can give him material for reflection and can serve to clarify what is here our peculiar business.

For the human understanding it is inescapably necessary to draw a distinction between what is possible and what is actual in things. The ground for this lies in the subject and in the nature of its faculties of cognition. For were their exercise not to call for two wholly disparate elements—understanding to supply concepts and sensible intuition to supply the objects answering to them—no such distinction (of the possible from the actual) would arise at all. Were our understanding an intuitive one, it would possess no objects save the actual. Concepts (bearing merely on an object's possibility) and sensible intuitions (which afford us something without on that account letting it be cognized as an object) would both drop away. Now, however, our entire distinction of the merely possible from the actual rests on this: that the former designates only the positing of a thing's representation relative to our concept, and to the capacity for thinking in general, whereas the latter designates the thing's being posited in itself (outside this concept). The distinction of possible things from actual ones is therefore one that holds merely subjectively for the human understanding, since we can, namely, always still have something in thought even though it is not, or represent something to ourselves as given even though we as yet have no concept of it. The propositions, then—that things may be possible without being actual, and hence that mere possibility licenses no inference whatever to actuality—hold quite correctly for human reason, without thereby proving that this difference lies in the things themselves. For that this admits of no such inference, so that those propositions, while they certainly do apply to objects as well—insofar as our faculty of cognition, being sensibly conditioned, concerns itself likewise with objects of the senses—yet do not apply to things as such, becomes clear from reason's ceaseless requirement that some entity or other (the primordial ground) be assumed as existing with unconditioned necessity, an entity in which possibility and actuality are no longer meant to be told apart, and for whose idea the understanding has strictly no concept, i.e., can hit upon no way of picturing to itself such a thing along with its manner of existing. For if it thinks it (however it may choose to think it), then it is represented merely as possible. Should it be conscious of the thing as given in intuition, it is then actual, without thinking anything of possibility in the process. Hence the concept of an absolutely necessary being is indeed an indispensable idea of reason, but a problematic concept unattainable for the human understanding. But it does hold for the use of our faculties of cognition according to their peculiar constitution, and hence not of the object, and thereby not for every cognizing being: because thinking and intuition, as two different conditions for exercising its faculties of cognition, and hence for the possibility and actuality of things, I cannot presuppose in every such being. For an understanding in which this distinction did not occur, it would mean: all objects that I cognize are (exist); and the possibility of some that nevertheless did not exist, i.e., their contingency if they do exist, and hence also the necessity to be distinguished from it, could not at all come into the representation of such a being. But what our understanding here finds so burdensome—matching reason with its concepts—is merely this: that for it, as human understanding, that is extravagant (i.e., impossible under the subjective conditions of its cognition) which reason nevertheless erects into a principle as pertaining to the object. — The maxim that governs throughout is this: that wherever the cognition of objects outstrips the capacity of the understanding, we think all of them in keeping with those subjective conditions for exercising our faculties which cling necessarily to our nature (i.e., the human one); and should the judgments delivered in this manner (as, with the extravagant concepts, could not be otherwise) prove unable to be constitutive principles that fix the object as it stands, they will yet abide as regulative ones—immanent and dependable in their exercise, and matched to the human purpose.

Just as reason, in the theoretical consideration of nature, finds itself compelled to posit the idea of an unconditioned necessity belonging to its primordial ground: so too, in the practical sphere, it presupposes its own unconditioned causality (with respect to nature)—that is, freedom—inasmuch as it is conscious of its moral command. But since here the objective necessity of the action, as a duty, is set in opposition to that which it would have as an occurrence if its ground were located in nature rather than in freedom (that is, in reason's own causality), and the morally absolutely necessary action is regarded physically as entirely contingent (i.e., that what necessarily ought to happen nevertheless often does not happen): it is clear that it derives solely from the subjective character of our practical faculty that the moral laws have to be represented as commands (and the actions that accord with them as duties), and that reason gives voice to this necessity not by means of a being (an occurring) but by means of an ought-to-be: which would not take place if reason were considered, as regards its causality, without sensibility (as the subjective condition under which it is applied to objects of nature), and hence as a cause in an intelligible world thoroughly agreeing with the moral law, where between ought and doing, between a practical law of what is possible through us and a theoretical law of what is actual through us, there would be no distinction. Now even granting that an intelligible world—one where each thing would be actual for the sole reason that it (as something good) is possible, freedom itself included as that world's formal condition—remains for us an extravagant concept, one incapable of furnishing a constitutive principle by which to determine an object together with its objective reality: this freedom does nevertheless, given the makeup of our (partly sensible) nature and faculty, serve us and every rational being bound up with the world of sense—so far as we can represent such beings to ourselves under the makeup of our reason—as a universal regulative principle, which, rather than determining objectively the constitution of freedom as a form of causality, instead, with validity no less than if it did so determine it, turns the rule of actions conforming to that idea into commands binding on everyone.

In the same way, with regard to the case we have in hand, this too may be conceded: no distinction between the mechanism of nature and its technic—that is, the linking of ends within it—would present itself to us if our understanding were not so constituted that it has to move from the general to the particular, whereby the power of judgment, faced with the particular, can discern no purposiveness in it and can therefore reach no determining judgments unless it is furnished with a general law beneath which that particular may be subsumed. But since the particular, taken as such, harbors something contingent in relation to the universal, while reason all the same requires unity, and thus lawfulness, in how nature's particular laws hang together (a lawfulness of the contingent that goes by the name of purposiveness), and since deriving those particular laws from the universal ones—as regards the contingency they carry within them—is a priori impossible by way of determining the concept of the object: the concept of nature's purposiveness in its products will accordingly be one that is necessary for the human power of judgment in relation to nature, yet does not touch the determination of the objects themselves—in short, a principle of reason that is subjective and meant for the power of judgment, a principle which, being regulative and not constitutive, holds for our human power of judgment with the very same necessity as though it were an objective principle.

§ 77. On the peculiarity of the human understanding through which the concept of a natural end becomes possible for us

In the remark we set out certain peculiarities of our faculty of cognition (even of its higher branch) which we are all too easily led to transfer onto the things themselves as objective predicates; these, however, bear upon ideas to which experience can supply no adequate object , and which could then do no more than serve as regulative principles as we pursue the latter. With the concept of a natural end matters stand just the same, as far as concerns the cause of the possibility of such a predicate, a cause that can lie nowhere but in the idea; yet the effect that corresponds to this idea (the product itself) is after all given in nature, and the concept of a causality belonging to nature—of a being acting in accordance with ends—seems to make of the idea of a natural end a constitutive principle for it: and therein it holds something that distinguishes it from every other idea.

But this distinguishing feature lies in the following: that the idea in question is a principle of reason belonging not to the understanding but rather to the power of judgment, and hence amounts merely to the application of an understanding in general to possible objects of experience; and this specifically where a judgment can be not determining but only reflecting, so that although the object is indeed given in experience, in accordance with the idea it can never even be determinately (let alone with full adequacy) judged, but can only be reflected upon.

It concerns, then, a peculiarity of our (human) understanding in relation to the power of judgment as the latter reflects upon things of nature. But if that is the case, then the idea of another possible understanding, one distinct from the human, must lie at the basis here (just as the Critique of Pure Reason obliged us to hold in mind another possible intuition, on the supposition that ours was to count as a particular kind—namely the kind for which objects are valid merely as appearances), so that one may say: in keeping with the special constitution of our understanding, certain natural products must be by us, in respect of their possibility, regarded, as produced intentionally and as ends, yet without on that account demanding that there really exist some particular cause having the representation of an end for its determining ground, and hence without denying that an understanding other (and higher) than the human might, even within nature's mechanism—that is, within a causal connection for which an understanding is not exclusively assumed as its cause—come upon the ground of the possibility of such products of nature.

What is at issue here, then, is how our understanding stands toward the power of judgment—namely, that in this relation we look for a certain contingency in the makeup of our own faculty, in order to mark out this peculiarity of our understanding as against other understandings that are possible.

This contingency shows itself quite naturally in the particular which the power of judgment is supposed to place beneath the universal furnished by the understanding's concepts; for the particular is left undetermined by the universal belonging to our (human) understanding; and it is a contingent matter in how many diverse ways things that nevertheless converge in a shared mark may present themselves to our perception. Our understanding is a power of concepts—that is, a discursive understanding—for which it is bound to be contingent of what kind, and how greatly varied, the particular may be that nature offers to it and that admits of being brought beneath its concepts. But since cognition calls for intuition as well, and since a power possessing a complete spontaneity of intuition would be a faculty of cognition set apart from sensibility and wholly independent of it—hence an understanding in the widest sense of the word—one may likewise conceive an intuitive understanding (negatively, that is, merely as one that is not discursive), which does not travel from the universal down to the particular and thereby to the individual (by way of concepts), and for which one does not meet with that contingency in the way nature, in its products, accords with the understanding under particular laws—the very contingency that makes it so difficult for ours to gather the manifold of those products into the unity of cognition; a labor that ours can carry through only by the agreement, itself highly contingent, of nature's marks with our power of concepts, whereas an intuiting understanding requires nothing of the sort.

Our understanding therefore has, with regard to the power of judgment, this feature of its own: that in the cognition it affords, the universal does not determine the particular, so that the latter cannot be derived from the former on its own; and yet this particular, amid the manifold of nature , is supposed to accord with the universal (by way of concepts and laws) so as to admit of subsumption beneath it—an accord which, in such circumstances, is bound to be highly contingent and, for the power of judgment, devoid of any determinate principle.

Now in order, nonetheless, at least to be able to think it possible that the things of nature should agree in this manner with the power of judgment (an agreement we represent as contingent, and hence as possible only through an end directed toward it), we must at the same time think another understanding, in relation to which—and indeed prior to any end ascribed to it—we are able to represent as necessary that agreement of the natural laws with our power of judgment which for our understanding is thinkable only through ends as the means of connection.

Our understanding, for its part, has this property: that in its cognition—of the cause of a product, for instance—it must proceed from the analytically universal (from concepts) to the particular (the given empirical intuition); whereby, as regards the manifoldness of the latter, it determines nothing, but must instead await that determination, a task belonging to the power of judgment , expecting it to arise once the empirical intuition (should the object be a natural product) has been brought under the concept. But we can equally conceive an understanding which, not being discursive like ours but intuitive, advances from the synthetically universal (the intuition of a whole taken as a whole) toward the particular—that is, from the whole down to its parts; an understanding, therefore, whose representation of the whole does not carry within itself the contingency with which the parts are combined, a contingency needed in order to render a determinate form of the whole possible, such as our understanding stands in need of, obliged as it is to proceed from the parts—taken as universally conceived grounds—toward the various possible forms, as consequences, that are to be subsumed beneath them. In keeping with how our understanding is constituted, on the other hand, a real whole of nature is to be regarded solely as the effect of the concurring moving forces of its parts. Suppose, then, that we wish to represent the possibility of the whole not as resting on the parts, in the manner suited to our discursive understanding, but rather—following the pattern of the intuitive (archetypal) one—the possibility of the parts (in their makeup and combination) as resting on the whole: then, owing to this very same peculiarity of our understanding, it cannot come about that the whole should furnish the ground on which the linkage of the parts is possible (which in the discursive mode of cognition would be a contradiction), but only that the representation of a whole should contain the ground of the possibility both of its form and of the linkage of parts that belongs to it. But since the whole, on this account, would then be an effect, a product, whose representation is regarded as the cause of its possibility—while a product is termed an end when the cause of it has for its determining ground nothing beyond the representation of its effect: it follows from this that it is merely a consequence of the peculiar constitution of our understanding when we picture products of nature as possible through a species of causality distinct from that of the natural laws of matter, namely through that of ends and final causes alone; and that this principle concerns not the possibility of such things in themselves (even considered as phenomena) under this mode of generation, but only the appraisal of them that is possible for our understanding. And here we grasp, at the same time, why in the science of nature we remain so far from content with an explanation of nature's products through a causality according to ends: it is because in such an explanation we are asking to judge natural production merely as suited to our capacity for judging it—that is, to the reflecting power of judgment—rather than as suited to the things themselves on behalf of the determining power of judgment. Nor is there any need, in all this, to establish that an intellectus archetypus of that kind is really possible; it is enough that, in setting it over against our own discursive understanding, which has need of images (intellectus ectypus), and against the contingency of a makeup of that sort, we are led to the idea in question (that of an intellectus archetypus), and that this idea, for its part, harbors no contradiction.

If we now look upon a whole of matter, as regards its form, as a product of the parts together with their forces and their capacity to combine of their own accord (further kinds of matter, which the parts bring to one another, being supplied in thought): then what we picture to ourselves is a mechanical manner of generating it. But no concept of a whole as an end issues from such a route—a concept whose inner possibility depends through and through on the idea of a whole, an idea on which the very makeup and manner of operation of the parts depends, exactly as we are bound to picture an organized body. From this, though—as was just demonstrated—it in no way follows that a mechanical generation of such a body would be impossible; for that would be tantamount to asserting that such a unity in the linkage of the manifold is impossible (that is, contradictory) for any understanding to represent to itself unless the idea of that unity were at once its generating cause, in other words unless production were intentional. And yet this would really follow, were we entitled to view material beings as things existing in themselves. For in that case the unity constituting the ground of the possibility of nature's formations would be nothing but the unity of space, which, however, is no real ground of what is generated but merely the formal condition thereof; though it bears some resemblance to the real ground we seek, in that within it not a single part admits of determination save through its relation to the whole (whose representation therefore underlies the possibility of the parts). Yet since it is at all events possible to view the material world as mere appearance and to conceive something as a thing in itself (one that is not appearance) serving as a substratum, and to lay beneath this substratum a corresponding intellectual intuition (granted that it is not our own): there would then obtain, for the nature to which we ourselves belong, a supersensible real ground—albeit one unknowable to us—within which nature we would accordingly consider whatever is necessary in it as an object of the senses under mechanical laws, but the harmony and unity of the particular laws, together with the forms answering to them—forms that, with respect to those laws, we must judge to be contingent—we would consider, in that same nature taken as an object of reason (indeed, nature as a whole as a system), under teleological laws besides, appraising it by two kinds of principle, without the mechanical manner of explanation being excluded by the teleological, as though the two contradicted one another.

From this, too, one can discern what otherwise, though readily enough surmised, could hardly be maintained and proved with any certainty, namely that while the principle for deriving purposive natural products mechanically may indeed stand alongside the teleological one, it can in no way make the latter dispensable: that is to say, with a thing we are obliged to judge to be a natural end (an organized being) one may certainly try out every law of mechanical generation, whether already known or still to be discovered, and may even hope to make good headway with them, yet one can never be excused, for the possibility of such a product, from appealing to a ground of production wholly different from these—namely, causality through ends; and no human reason whatever (nor any finite reason resembling ours in quality, however far it might outstrip it in degree) can hope to make the generation of so much as a single blade of grass intelligible from purely mechanical causes. For if the teleological linkage of causes and effects is altogether indispensable to the power of judgment where the possibility of such an object is concerned—even merely in order to study that object along the guiding thread of experience; if, for outer objects taken as appearances, no sufficient ground bearing on ends is to be met with at all, but this ground, which likewise lies within nature, must after all be sought only in nature's supersensible substratum, from which every possible insight is nonetheless barred to us: then it is flatly impossible for us to draw, out of nature itself, grounds of explanation for connections directed to ends, and it becomes necessary, given the makeup of the human faculty of cognition, to seek the highest ground of this within an original understanding acting as the world-cause.

§ 78. On combining the principle of matter's general mechanism with the teleological principle in nature's technique

It matters infinitely much to reason not to let go of the mechanism of nature in its productions and not to pass it by when explaining them: for apart from it there is no attaining any insight into the nature of things. Even if it be granted to us that a supreme architect directly created the forms of nature just as they have always existed, or predetermined those that in nature's course continuously form themselves after this very same pattern: our cognition of nature is thereby not advanced in the slightest: for we have no acquaintance whatever with that being's mode of action, nor with its ideas, which are supposed to contain the principles governing how natural beings are possible, and we are unable to explain nature by descending from it, as though from on high (a priori). If, however, in order to explain them, we appeal—setting out from the forms that the objects of experience present, and thus ascending from below (a posteriori), because we believe we encounter purposiveness in them—to a cause acting according to ends : then we would be explaining in a wholly tautological manner and deceiving reason with words, not to mention that, wherever this kind of explanation loses us in the extravagant, into which our cognition of nature cannot follow, reason is enticed into raving poetically, the prevention of which is precisely its most excellent vocation.

On the other side, reason has an equally necessary maxim: not to overlook the principle of ends in the products of nature: for even though this does not exactly render the manner of their origination more comprehensible to us, it nonetheless serves as a heuristic principle for tracking down nature's particular laws; granting, too, that one would not want to put it to any use in explaining nature itself accordingly, inasmuch as one still calls such products merely natural ends—even where they plainly display an intentional unity of ends—i.e., without searching beyond nature for the ground of their possibility. But because in the end the question regarding the latter must nevertheless come up: it is just as necessary for reason to conceive a special kind of causality, one not found in nature, as the mechanics of natural causes has its own, since to the receptivity for several and other forms than those matter is capable of by the latter, there must further supervene a spontaneity belonging to a cause (which accordingly cannot be matter), apart from which none of those forms could be given any ground. To be sure, before taking this step reason must proceed cautiously and not seek to declare every technique of nature—i.e., a productive faculty of nature that exhibits in itself a purposiveness of shape for our mere apprehension (as with regular bodies)—to be teleological, but must rather keep regarding it, for as long as it can, as merely mechanically possible; yet to want, on that account, to shut out the teleological principle entirely and, wherever purposiveness reveals itself quite undeniably to reason's inquiry into how natural forms are possible through their causes as a relation to another kind of causality, still to insist on following mere mechanism, would make reason just as fantastical and given to roaming amid figments of natural powers that cannot even be conceived, as a merely teleological manner of explanation, taking no account at all of nature's mechanism, would make it fanatically enthusiastic.

Within one and the selfsame natural thing, one cannot tie the two principles together as fundamental propositions by which the one is explained (deduced) from the other—in other words, they cannot be fused, for the determining power of judgment, into dogmatic and constitutive principles that afford insight into nature. Suppose, for instance, that I take a maggot to be something one must regard as produced by the sheer mechanism of matter (by the new formation it brings about of itself once putrefaction sets its elements free): in that case I cannot then trace the selfsame product back to this same matter regarded as a causality operating in accordance with ends. The reverse holds as well: should I regard that same product as a natural end, I am unable to rely on a mechanical way of generating it and to take up this mode as a constitutive principle for appraising how it is possible, thereby uniting the two principles. For the one manner of explanation rules out the other; even granting that both grounds of such a product's possibility objectively rested upon one and the same ground, to which, however, we paid no heed. The principle meant to make the two compatible in judging nature according to them must be located in what lies beyond both (and hence beyond any possible empirical representation of nature) yet contains the ground of that representation—that is, in the supersensible—while each of the two manners of explanation must be referred to it. Since, then, all we can possess of it is the indeterminate concept of a ground making possible the appraisal of nature by empirical laws—a concept we cannot, for the rest, pin down more closely through any predicate—it follows that what unites the two principles cannot be a ground of explanation (explication) of a product's possibility according to given laws, serving the determining power of judgment, but can only be a ground of discussion (exposition) of that possibility, serving the reflecting power of judgment. — For to explain is to derive from a principle that one must accordingly be able to cognize distinctly and to state. Now the principle of nature's mechanism and that of its causality according to ends must indeed, in one and the very same natural product, hang together within a single higher principle and issue jointly from it, since otherwise they could not coexist in our contemplation of nature. But if this objectively shared principle—which thereby also legitimates the shared maxims of natural research that depend on it—is of such a kind that it can indeed be pointed to, yet never determinately cognized and clearly stated for use in cases as they arise: then from such a principle no explanation, i.e., no clear and determinate derivation, can be drawn of how a natural product possible according to those two heterogeneous principles comes to be. But now the shared principle of the mechanical derivation on the one hand and the teleological one on the other is the supersensible, which we must place beneath nature as appearance. Of this, however, we can form, for theoretical purposes, not the slightest affirmatively determinate concept. How, then, in accordance with this principle nature (according to its particular laws) is to make up for us a system cognizable as possible both by the principle of generating physical things and by that of final causes: this simply cannot be explained; rather, only if it turns out that objects of nature occur which, as to their possibility, we cannot think according to the principle of mechanism (which at all times has its claim upon a natural being) without leaning on teleological principles, does their occurrence presuppose that one may confidently investigate both in keeping with the laws of nature (once the possibility of their product from the one or the other principle is knowable to our understanding), without taking offense at the apparent conflict that arises between the principles for judging that product: because at least the possibility that the two might, even objectively, be reconcilable in one principle (given that they concern appearances presupposing a supersensible ground) stands secured.

Thus, even though both the mechanism and the teleological (intentional) technicism of nature may, in respect of the very same product and its possibility, fall under a common higher principle of nature according to particular laws: still, since this principle is transcendent, we cannot, given how limited our understanding is, unite the two principles in explaining one and the same production of nature whenever the inner possibility of this product is intelligible solely through a causality according to ends (as organized kinds of matter indeed are). It thus remains with the above principle of teleology: that, given the constitution of the human understanding, for the possibility of organic beings in nature no cause can be assumed other than one acting intentionally, and that nature's mere mechanism can in no way suffice to explain these products of hers; yet without meaning thereby to decide anything, by way of this principle, about the possibility of such things themselves.

For this principle amounts to nothing more than a maxim belonging to the reflecting rather than the determining power of judgment, and it therefore holds good only subjectively, for us, and not objectively, for the very possibility of things of this kind (a case where both modes of generation could well be connected in one and the same ground); and since, moreover, in the absence of any concept—added to the teleologically conceived mode of generation—of a mechanism of nature to be encountered there alongside it, a generation of that sort could not be judged a natural product at all: the maxim just stated carries with it, at the same time, the necessity of uniting the two principles when things are judged as natural ends, yet not so as to put the one, wholly or in certain respects, in the place of the other. For no mechanism can take the place of what (by us, at any rate) is conceived as possible solely in accordance with an intention; and in place of what mechanism marks out as necessary one may assume no contingency standing in need of an end for its ground of determination : what is possible instead is merely to subordinate the one (mechanism) beneath the other (the intentional technicism), a step the transcendental principle of nature's purposiveness quite well allows.

For once ends are thought of as grounds on which certain things are possible, one has to posit means as well, means whose operative law of itself demands nothing that would presuppose an end, and which may thus be mechanical while still being a subordinate cause of intentional effects. For this reason, in organic products of nature—and all the more once, moved by their boundless number, we go on (at least as a permissible hypothesis) to take the intentional element in the connection of natural causes under particular laws as a universal principle of the reflecting power of judgment in regard to nature as a totality (the world)—it becomes possible to think a vast, indeed universal, joining of mechanical to teleological laws throughout what nature brings forth, and do so without mixing up the principles by which they are judged or putting the one where the other belongs: for in a teleological appraisal, matter, even when the form it assumes is judged to be possible only according to intention, can still, by its own nature and conformably to mechanical laws, be subordinated as a means to that represented end; though, inasmuch as the ground of this reconcilability lies in what is neither of the two (neither mechanism nor the linkage of ends) but is instead the supersensible substratum of nature, of which we cognize nothing, for our (the human) reason the two ways of representing the possibility of such objects cannot be melted into one, and we can appraise them in no other way than as grounded, in keeping with the connection of final causes, upon a supreme understanding, so that thereby nothing at all is taken from the teleological manner of explanation.

But since it is now entirely undetermined, and for our reason also undeterminable for all time, how much the mechanism of nature accomplishes as a means toward every final aim within it; and since, in view of the intelligible principle mentioned above concerning the possibility of a nature as such, it may indeed be assumed that nature is throughout possible according to both kinds of universally concordant laws (the physical laws and those of final causes), even though we can have no insight whatever into how this comes about: we likewise do not know how far the mechanical manner of explanation available to us reaches, but only this much is certain: that, however far we may ever advance in it, it will in every case fall short for things we have once recognized as natural ends, and that we must therefore, given the constitution of our understanding, subordinate all those grounds together to a teleological principle.

On this, then, rests the entitlement—and, because of the importance that studying nature by the principle of mechanism holds for our theoretical use of reason, the calling as well—to explain all products and events of nature, even the most purposive, mechanically as far as this ever lies within our power (whose bounds we cannot state within this manner of investigation), while yet never losing sight of the fact that those which we can so much as put forward for investigation solely under the concept of an end of reason must, as the essential constitution of our reason demands and notwithstanding those mechanical causes, ultimately be subordinated to the causality according to ends.

Appendix. Methodology of the Teleological Power of Judgment