§ 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

§ 79. Whether teleology must be treated as belonging to the doctrine of nature

Within the encyclopedia of all the sciences, each and every science must occupy a determinate place of its own. Should it be a philosophical science, then it must be assigned its place within either the theoretical or the practical part thereof; and, if its place lies in the former, then either within the doctrine of nature—so far as this weighs whatever can become an object of experience (hence within the theory of corporeal things, the theory of the soul, and general cosmology)—or within the doctrine of God (dealing with the world's primordial ground, taken as the sum-total of all objects of experience).

The question, then, arises: which place is due to teleology? Does it fall under natural science (properly so called), or under theology? It must be the one or the other; for the passage from the one into the other can accommodate no science at all, seeing that such a transition means nothing more than the system's articulation or organization and affords no standing place within it.

That teleology constitutes no part of theology, even though within theology the weightiest use may be made of it, is clear in and of itself. For its object is the productions of nature and the cause of these; and although it does point out beyond, to that cause as a ground lying outside of and above nature (a divine author), it nevertheless does so not for the sake of the determining power of judgment, but only (so that the judging of things in the world may be guided, through an idea of this sort, by a regulative principle adapted to the human understanding) for the sake of the reflecting power of judgment as it contemplates nature.

Yet it seems, by the same token, to have no more place in natural science either, which requires principles that are determining and not merely reflecting if it is to supply objective grounds for the workings of nature. Indeed, neither for the theory of nature nor for the mechanical explanation of its phenomena by way of their efficient causes is anything whatever won by considering them according to how ends stand related to one another. To exhibit nature's ends in its products, so far as these constitute a system in accordance with teleological concepts, really pertains only to a description of nature composed along a special guiding thread—one where reason does carry out a splendid business, instructive and in various respects practically purposive, yet yields no disclosure at all about the origination and inner possibility of these forms, which is, after all, the very thing that theoretical natural science is really about.

Teleology, taken as a science, thus belongs to no doctrine whatever, but solely to critique—and specifically to the critique of one particular faculty of cognition, that is to say, of the power of judgment. But in so far as it contains principles a priori, it can and must lay down the method by which nature is to be judged following the principle of final causes; and in this way its doctrine of method exercises at least a negative influence on the procedure of theoretical natural science, and also on the relation which the latter may have, within metaphysics, to theology as its propaedeutic.

§ 80. On the necessary subordination of the principle of mechanism under the teleological one in explaining a thing as a natural end

The warrant to set out upon a purely mechanical manner of explaining every natural product is, taken by itself, wholly without limit; but the capability to make do with that manner alone is, given how our understanding is constituted, so far as it has dealings with things as natural ends, not merely much confined but also distinctly bounded: namely in such fashion that on a principle of the power of judgment nothing whatever can be achieved toward the explanation of the latter through that first procedure taken alone, so that the judging of such products must always, on our part, be brought at the same time under a teleological principle.

It is therefore rational, and even to one's credit, to trace natural mechanism, for the purpose of explaining the products of nature, as far as one plausibly can, and not to give this endeavor up on the ground that meeting with nature's purposiveness along such a route is in itself impossible, but only because it is so for us as human beings; for it would call for an intuition of a kind other than the sensible, together with a determinate cognition of nature's intelligible substrate, out of which the very ground of the mechanism of the appearances under particular laws could be furnished — something that lies wholly past our power.

In order, then, that the student of nature not toil to no avail, he must, when appraising those things whose concept as natural ends stands beyond doubt (namely organized beings), invariably presuppose some primordial organization that presses that very mechanism into service, whether for generating further organized forms or for unfolding its own into fresh shapes (which, all the same, arise ever out of that purpose and answer to it ).

It is a praiseworthy thing to survey the vast creation of organized natures through a comparative anatomy, so as to see whether something resembling a system, and this too as regards the principle by which they are generated, is not to be met with in it; without our being obliged to remain stuck at the bare principle of judging (which yields no disclosure about how they are generated) and, losing heart, to renounce every claim to insight into nature in this domain. That so many kinds of animal coincide in one certain shared pattern, which seems to underlie not merely their bony framework but the disposition of the other parts as well, where a strikingly simple ground-plan has managed, by cutting one part short and drawing another out, by folding these parts in and unfolding those, to yield so vast a variety of species, lets a beam of hope, faint though it be, fall upon the mind, that here, perhaps, something may be achieved by that principle of nature's mechanism apart from which no science of nature whatever is possible. This analogy of forms, in so far as, for all their variety, they appear to have been produced after one common prototype, reinforces the surmise that they are genuinely related in their descent from a single common ancestral mother, by way of a step-by-step gradation of one animal kind toward the next, starting from the one in which the principle of ends stands most confirmed, that is, the human being, and running down to the polyp, and from the polyp on to mosses and lichens, and at the last to the lowest grade of nature that we can still notice, namely brute matter: out of which, and out of its powers operating under mechanical laws (of the same sort as those governing it when crystals form), the entire technic of nature, so far past our grasp in organized beings that we take ourselves obliged to conceive another principle for it, appears to take its origin.

At this point the archaeologist of nature stands at liberty to derive that vast family of creatures from the surviving vestiges of nature's most ancient upheavals, following every mechanism of hers that he knows or conjectures (for thus one would be obliged to conceive them, should the pervasive, interconnected kinship already spoken of be meant to rest on a ground). He may let the earth's maternal womb, freshly issued from its chaotic condition (a great animal, as it were), bring forth at the outset creatures of a form less suited to purpose, and these again yet others that shaped themselves in closer keeping with their birthplace and their mutual relations; until that womb, grown stiff and turned to bone, had confined its offspring to fixed species degenerating no further, and the manifold thereafter stayed such as it had turned out once the working of that fertile formative power reached its close. — Yet even so he must, to that end, ascribe to this universal mother an organization purposively set up with regard to all these creatures, since otherwise the end-directed shape of what the animal and vegetable kingdoms bring forth cannot be thought as possible at all.²⁸ But then he has merely pushed the ground of explanation back a stage, and may not lay claim to having rendered the origination of those two realms free of any dependence on final causes.

So far even as it concerns the alteration to which certain individuals of the organized kinds are subjected by chance, once one finds that a character thus altered passes by inheritance and is absorbed into the procreative power, one cannot suitably judge it as anything but the occasional unfolding of a purposive predisposition, present in the species from the start, serving the kind's self-preservation: for, given the thoroughgoing inner purposiveness of an organized being, the begetting of its like is bound up so intimately with the requirement that nothing be absorbed into the procreative power which does not likewise belong, within such a system of ends, to one of its as-yet-undeveloped original predispositions. For should one abandon this principle, one could no longer be sure whether various pieces of the form now met with in a species might not be of a like accidental, purposeless origin; and the principle of teleology, namely to count nothing in an organized being, among all that keeps itself going through that being's reproduction, as contrary to purpose, would thereby grow highly untrustworthy in its use and hold good only for the primal stem (which, however, is no longer known to us).

Hume brings, against those who deem it needful to posit, for all such natural ends, a teleological principle of judging, that is, an architectonic understanding, the objection that one might with just as much right ask how such an understanding is itself possible, that is, how the several powers and characteristics that constitute the possibility of an understanding possessed at once of executive might could have gathered so purposively into a single being. Yet this objection comes to nothing. For the entire difficulty besetting the question of how a thing that harbors ends within itself, and is intelligible through them alone, first comes to be, rests on the demand for a single ground of the linkage of the manifold that lies external to one another in this product; and thus, once this ground is placed in the understanding of a productive cause taken as a simple substance, that question, so far as it is teleological, receives adequate answer, whereas if the cause be looked for in matter alone, taken as an assemblage of numerous substances lying apart from one another, then all unity of principle for the inwardly purposive form of matter's shaping is wanting; and the autocracy of matter in products that our understanding can grasp only as ends is a word without meaning.

It is from this that those who look for a highest ground of the possibility of matter's objectively purposive forms while refusing to allow that ground an understanding, are nevertheless ready to turn the sum of the world into one solitary, all-encompassing substance (pantheism), or else (which is merely a more determinate account of the former) into an aggregate of many determinations that inhere in one solitary simple substance (Spinozism), simply so as to secure that prerequisite of all purposiveness, the unity of the ground; and here, while they do meet one condition of the task, namely unity in the reference to ends, through the bare ontological concept of a simple substance, yet toward the other condition, namely the bearing of that substance upon its result as an end, the very thing by which the ontological ground was to be given closer determination for the question, they bring forward nothing, and so leave the whole question entirely unanswered. It stays, moreover, wholly past answering (for our reason) unless we picture to ourselves that primordial ground of things as a simple substance, and its property, as concerns the specific make-up of the natural forms that rest upon it, that is, their unity of ends, as the property of an intelligent substance, while picturing the bearing of that substance on those forms (owing to the contingency we discover in everything we are able to think as possible only as an end) as the bearing of a causality.

§ 81. On adjoining mechanism to the teleological principle in explaining a natural end as a natural product

Just as the mechanism of nature, as the foregoing § established, cannot of itself suffice for thinking, on that basis, the possibility of an organized being, but must instead be subordinated at the outset (at least given how our faculty of cognition is constituted) to a cause that acts by design, so likewise the bare teleological ground of such a being does not suffice for us to consider and judge it at once as a product that nature yields, so long as the mechanism proper to the latter is not conjoined with the former as the instrument, so to speak, of a designedly acting cause, to whose purposes nature in its mechanical laws is subordinated all the same. How two entirely distinct sorts of causality could be united in this way — namely nature under its general conformity to law together with an idea that confines nature to a specific form for which nature by itself holds no ground whatever — is something our reason cannot grasp; that unification resides in nature's supersensible substrate, concerning which we can affirmatively establish nothing beyond the point that it constitutes the being in itself whose mere appearance is all we are acquainted with. The principle, however — that whatever we assume to pertain to this nature (Phaenomenon) and to count as its product we must likewise conceive as bound up with it by mechanical laws — retains its validity none the less: for lacking this species of causality, organized beings, as ends of nature, would after all be no products of nature.

Supposing, then, that one accepts the teleological principle governing how these beings are generated (as indeed nothing else is possible), one may lay at the base of the cause of their internally purposive form either occasionalism or prestabilism. On the former, the supreme cause of the world would, in accordance with its idea, on the occasion of every mating directly impart the organic formation to the matter that mingles therein; on the latter, it would have placed into the initial products of this its wisdom only the predisposition, by means of which an organic being brings forth its own kind and the species continually maintains itself, and likewise the loss of individuals is continuously made good by a nature that is at the same time working toward their destruction. Should one accept occasionalism for the bringing-forth of organized beings, the whole of nature is in that case utterly forfeited, and along with it every exercise of reason in appraising whether products of such a kind are possible; hence one may take it for granted that anyone who cares in the least about philosophy will never embrace this system.

Prestabilism, in turn, can proceed in two ways. For it regards every organic being generated by its own kind either as the educt or as the product of the former. Where generations are regarded as mere educts, the system bears the name of individual preformation, or else the theory of evolution; where they are regarded as products, it is termed the system of epigenesis. One may equally designate this last as the system of generic preformation: for the generative capacity of the parents does proceed according to the inner purposive predispositions apportioned to their stock, so that the specific form stood virtualiter preformed. In keeping with this, the rival theory of individual preformation might with more propriety be given the name theory of involution (or of encasement).

The champions of the theory of evolution, who exempt every individual from the formative power of nature so as to let it come directly from the hand of the creator, were nevertheless unwilling to venture to have this happen according to the hypothesis of occasionalism, whereby mating would be a mere formality, under which a supreme intelligent cause of the world would have resolved on each occasion to form a fruit with its own immediate hand and to leave to the mother only its unfolding and nourishment. They declared themselves for preformation; just as if it made no difference whether such forms are let to arise supernaturally at the beginning or in the course of the world, and as if a great many supernatural arrangements were not rather spared by occasional creation — arrangements that would be required so that the embryo formed at the world's beginning should not, throughout the long stretch until its development, suffer from the destructive forces of nature and should preserve itself unharmed, and likewise an immeasurably greater number of such preformed beings than would ever be brought to development, and with them just as many creations, would thereby be rendered needless and purposeless. Yet they did at least want to leave something here to nature, so as not to lapse entirely into a complete hyperphysics that can dispense with all explanation of nature. They did indeed still hold fast to their hyperphysics, even when they found in malformations (which one surely cannot possibly take to be ends of nature) an admirable purposiveness, though it might be aimed at nothing more than that an anatomist should one day take offense at it, as at a purposeless purposiveness, and feel a dispiriting admiration. But the generation of hybrids they simply could not fit into the system of preformation, and instead had to grant to the seed of the male creatures — to which they had otherwise conceded nothing but the mechanical property of serving as the embryo's first nourishment — on top of all this a purposively formative power: which, however, with regard to the whole product of a generation from two creatures of the same kind, they were unwilling to allow to either of the two.

If, by contrast, one did not even recognize in the defender of epigenesis the great advantage he has over the former with respect to the empirical grounds for the proof of his theory, reason would nevertheless already be disposed in advance with marked favor toward his manner of explanation, because it regards nature, with respect to those things one can originally represent as possible only according to the causality of ends, as itself productive — at least so far as reproduction is concerned — and not merely as unfolding, and thus, with the smallest possible expenditure of the supernatural, leaves to nature everything that follows from the first beginning onward (without, however, determining anything about this first beginning, at which physics altogether founders, whatever chain of causes it may try to work with).

With regard to this theory of epigenesis, no one has done more, both toward proving it and toward establishing the genuine principles of its application — in part by setting bounds to an overly presumptuous use of it — than the court councillor Blumenbach. It is from organized matter that he begins all physical modes of explaining these formations . For the claim that crude matter shaped itself originally in conformity with mechanical laws, that life could have arisen out of the nature of what is lifeless, and that matter, of its own accord, could have fitted itself into the form of a purposiveness that sustains itself — this he justly pronounces repugnant to reason; and yet he simultaneously grants to the natural mechanism, beneath this principle of an original organization that is unfathomable to us, a share both indeterminable and yet unmistakable, in view of which he names the capacity of matter (as opposed to the merely mechanical formative power that everywhere inheres in it), within an organized body, a formative drive (standing, so to speak, under the loftier direction and instruction of the former).

§ 82. On the teleological system in the outer relations of organized beings

By external purposiveness I understand the sort in which one natural thing serves another as a means to an end. Now things that possess no inner purposiveness, nor presuppose any for their possibility—earths, air, water, and the like, for instance—can nonetheless be highly purposive externally, that is, in their relation to other beings; yet these latter must always be organized beings, that is, natural ends, since otherwise the former could not be judged to be means at all. Thus water, air, and earths cannot be regarded as means for the piling up of mountains, because these contain nothing in themselves that would require a ground of their possibility in terms of ends, in relation to which, accordingly, their cause can never be represented under the predicate of a means (one that would serve for it).

The concept of external purposiveness differs completely from that of inner purposiveness, the latter being bound up with the possibility of an object, no matter whether that object's actuality is itself an end or not. Concerning an organized being one can still raise the question: to what end does it exist? yet this is hardly possible for things in which we recognize nothing more than the working of nature's mechanism. For with the former we already picture to ourselves a causality according to ends as belonging to their inner possibility—a creating understanding—and we relate this active faculty to its determining ground, the intention. Only a single external purposiveness exists which stands in connection with the inner purposiveness of organization and which, although the question may not be posed as to what end a being thus organized had to come into existence, still performs the office, in the external relation, of a means toward an end. This constitutes the organization of both sexes in their mutual relation for the reproduction of their kind; for here, just as in the case of a single individual, one may still inquire: why was the existence of such a pair necessary? The answer is: it is precisely this that first constitutes an organizing whole, though not an organized one within a single body.

If the question is now raised as to what a thing exists for, the reply runs either thus: its being and its production bear no connection at all to a cause that operates by design, in which case its origin is invariably taken to arise from nature's mechanism; or thus: its being rests on some deliberate ground (as that of a contingent natural entity), a thought that can hardly be detached from the concept of an organized thing—for, seeing that we are once obliged to lay beneath its inner possibility a causality of final causes along with an idea serving as its basis, neither are we able to conceive of this product's existence in any manner other than as an end. For that effect which has been represented, and whose representation is at once the determining ground moving the intelligent efficient cause to produce it, bears the name end. In this instance, accordingly, one may assert either: the end of such a natural being's existence resides within the being itself, so that it counts not solely as an end but likewise as a final end; or: that end lies beyond it, within other natural beings, so that its purposive existence is not that of a final end but rather, of necessity and at the same time, that of a means.

If, however, we go through the whole of nature, we come upon no being within it, considered as nature, that could lay claim to the privilege of serving as the final end of creation; and it may even be demonstrated a priori that whatever might perhaps still serve nature as a last end, however it be furnished with every conceivable determination and property one could wish, still, as a natural thing, could never be a final end.

When one looks at the vegetable kingdom, one might at first, on account of the immeasurable fertility by which it spreads over almost every soil, be led to the thought of taking it for a mere product of the mechanism that nature exhibits in the structures of the mineral realm. Yet a closer acquaintance with the indescribably wise organization within it does not let us cling to this thought, and instead prompts the question: for what purpose are these creatures there? If one gives oneself the answer: for the animal kingdom, which draws its nourishment therefrom and could thereby extend itself over the earth in such a diversity of genera, then the question comes back once more: for what, after all, do these plant-devouring animals exist? The answer would run roughly thus: for the beasts of prey, which can nourish themselves only on what has life. Finally the question arises: for what are these, together with the preceding kingdoms of nature, good? For the human being, toward the manifold uses which his understanding instructs him to derive from all those creatures; and he is the last end of creation here on earth, since he alone among the beings upon it is capable of forming for himself a concept of ends and of building, by means of his reason, a system of ends out of an aggregate of things shaped in a purposive fashion.

With the chevalier Linnaeus one might also take the seemingly opposite route and declare: the plant-eating animals exist so as to keep within bounds the rank growth of the vegetable kingdom, through which many of its species would otherwise be smothered; the beasts of prey, so as to place a check upon the greed of the former; and lastly the human being, so that, by hunting and thinning these out, a certain balance may be founded among nature's productive and destructive powers. And so the human being, however greatly he may in one respect be honored as an end, would nonetheless, in yet another respect, possess merely the standing of a means.

Should one adopt as one's principle an objective purposiveness in the manifold of the genera of the earth's creatures and in their external relation to one another; regarded as beings constructed in a purposive way, then it conforms to reason to conceive, within this same relation, once more a certain organization, together with a system that comprehends all the realms of nature according to final causes. Yet here experience seems loudly to contradict the maxim of reason, above all as regards a last end of nature, which is nonetheless requisite if such a system is to be possible, and which we are able to posit nowhere save in the human being: since, on the contrary, with respect to him, as one of the many animal species, nature has made not the slightest exception, whether among the destructive or among the generative forces, subjecting everything to a mechanism of its own without any end.

The first thing that, in an arrangement toward a purposive whole of the natural beings upon the earth, would have to be set up intentionally would presumably be their dwelling place, the ground and the element upon and within which they were to have their subsistence. Yet a more exact acquaintance with the constitution of this foundation of all organic generation points to no other causes than wholly unintentionally operating ones—indeed to causes rather more devastating than favorable to generation, order, and ends. Land and sea contain within themselves not merely the monuments of ancient mighty devastations that befell them and all the creatures upon and within them; rather their entire construction—the earth-layers of the one, the boundaries of the other—wholly bears the look of a product of the wild, all-powerful forces of a nature laboring in a chaotic condition. However purposively the shape, the structure, and the slope of the lands may now seem to be arranged for the reception of the waters from the air, for the springs and veins between strata of manifold kinds (for various products), and for the course of the rivers: a closer investigation of them nevertheless proves that they came about merely as the effect partly of fiery, partly of watery eruptions, or even of upheavals of the ocean; this holds both for the first generation of this shape and, above all, for its later transformation together with the perishing of its first organic productions.²⁹ If, then, the dwelling place, the mother-soil (of the land) and the mother-womb (of the sea), for all these creatures points to no other than a wholly unintentional mechanism of its generation: by what means and with what right may we require and maintain some other origin for these latter products? Even though the human being, as the most exacting examination of the remains of those natural devastations (according to Camper's judgment) seems to prove, was not included in these revolutions: he is nevertheless so dependent on the rest of the earth's creatures that, if a mechanism of nature holding sway over all the others is granted, he too must be regarded as included under it; even if his understanding has been able (at least for the most part) to rescue him amid their devastations.

This argument, however, appears to establish more than lay in the aim for the sake of which it was set forth: namely, not only that the human being can constitute no last end of nature and that, for the very same reason, the assemblage of organized natural things upon the earth is incapable of forming a system of ends; but even, beyond this, that those natural products formerly taken for natural ends have no origin whatsoever besides nature's mechanism.

But in the foregoing resolution of the antinomy between the principles of the mechanical and the teleological manner of generating organic natural beings, this became clear to us: that, inasmuch as, with regard to nature insofar as it forms according to its own peculiar laws (whose systematic coherence, however, eludes our grasp for want of the key), those principles are nothing but principles of the reflecting power of judgment —principles which do not settle the origin of such beings as it is in itself but declare only that, such being the constitution of our understanding and our reason, we can conceive that origin in beings of this sort in no way but according to final causes—the greatest exertion, indeed audacity, in endeavors to explain them mechanically is not alone permitted, but reason itself calls us to it, however well we know that here we can never reach our aim, and this on subjective grounds lying in the special character and the bounds set to our understanding (and not, for instance, because a mechanism of generation would of itself run counter to an origin by ends); and that, at last, in the supersensible principle of nature (as much beyond us as within us) there may quite possibly reside the compatibility of the two ways of representing to ourselves nature's possibility, since representing things by way of final causes is but a subjective condition governing how we employ our reason, whenever it will not have objects judged merely as appearances but insists that these appearances, along with their own principles, be traced back to the supersensible substrate, so as to render attainable certain laws of their unity, which it can bring before itself in no other manner than through ends (among which reason likewise possesses ends that are supersensible).

§ 83. On the ultimate end of nature as a teleological system

In what preceded, we demonstrated that, on principles of reason, we have cause enough to appraise the human being—not merely as a natural end, in the way that every organized being is one, but here on earth as the ultimate end of nature, in relation to which all the rest of nature's things make up a system of ends—valid, to be sure, not for the determining but only for the reflecting power of judgment. Now if what is to be advanced as an end by way of his connection with nature has to be met with in the human being himself, then either this end must be of such a sort that nature, through its benevolence, can bring it to satisfaction of itself, or it lies in the fitness and skill for ends of every kind, toward which nature may be put to use by him (outwardly and inwardly). Nature's first end would be the human being's happiness, its second his culture.

Happiness is not a concept that the human being somehow abstracts from his instincts, thereby lifting it out of the animality within him; rather, it is a mere idea of a condition to which, under conditions that are merely empirical (which is impossible), he would have the latter conform. He sketches it out for himself, and indeed in such varied ways, through his understanding as entangled with imagination and the senses; and he alters this understanding so often that nature, even were it wholly subject to his choice, could nonetheless adopt no determinate, universal, and fixed law by which to accord with this fluctuating concept and thus with the end that each person arbitrarily sets before himself. Yet even were we, on the one side, to bring this down to the genuine need of nature, in respect of which our species is throughout at one with itself, or, on the other, to heighten to any degree whatever the skill of furnishing oneself with imagined ends, that which a human being means by happiness—and which is in truth his own ultimate natural end (an end not of freedom)—would nonetheless never be reached by him; since his nature is not such as to halt at any point in possession and enjoyment and there arrive at satisfaction. On the contrary, it is so far from true that nature has adopted him as its peculiar darling and, above all the animals, showered benefits upon him, that in its destructive workings—plague, famine, peril of flood, frost, the onslaught of other creatures large and small, and suchlike—it spares him just as little as any other animal; and worse still, that the perversity of the natural predispositions in him casts him into self-contrived torments, and casts yet others of his own kind, through the pressure of lordship, the savagery of wars, and so on, into like distress, while he for his part, so far as lies in him, toils at the ruin of his own kind—so that even were the nature outside us as benevolent as could be, its end, had it been fixed upon the happiness of our species, would go unattained in any system of it on earth, because the nature within us has no receptivity for it. He therefore remains forever no more than one link within the chain of natural ends: a principle, admittedly, in regard to many an end for which nature, by its arrangement, appears to have destined him, since he makes himself into that; but withal also a means toward preserving purposiveness in the mechanism of the remaining links. Being the sole creature on earth endowed with understanding, and hence with a capacity to set ends for itself at will, he is indeed the titular lord of nature and, if one regards nature as a teleological system, by his vocation the ultimate end of nature; but always only conditionally, namely that he understand it and have the will to give to nature and to himself such a relation of ends as can be sufficient unto itself independently of nature, and hence be a final end—one that, however, need not be sought in nature at all.

But to discover in the human being where, at the least, we ought to place that ultimate end of nature, we must single out whatever nature has it in its power to accomplish in readying him for what falls to him alone to do if he is to be a final end, and set this apart from all those ends the possibility of which depends on conditions that nature by itself may be counted upon to supply. To this latter sort belongs earthly happiness, meaning the totality of all those ends of his that nature makes possible both outside and within the human being; such is the matter of every end he has on earth, and should he make it his entire end, it deprives him of the capacity to appoint a final end for his own existence and to bring himself into accord with it. Of all his ends in nature, then, there is left over only the formal, subjective condition—namely that of the fitness to set himself ends at all and (independently of nature in the way he determines his ends) to make use of nature as a means suited to the maxims of his free ends generally—which is precisely what nature is able to bring about in view of the final end that lies beyond it, and which may accordingly count as nature's ultimate end. Culture is the name for the bringing-forth of a rational being's fitness for ends of any sort whatsoever (and hence in its freedom). Culture alone, accordingly, is capable of being the ultimate end that we have reason to ascribe to nature in regard to the human species (not the human being's own earthly happiness, and still less his serving merely as the chief tool for founding order and unanimity in the reasonless nature outside him).

But not every culture is sufficient for this ultimate end of nature. That of skill is, to be sure, the chief subjective condition of a fitness for advancing ends at large; yet it does not thereby suffice to advance the will in the determining and choosing of its ends—something that nonetheless belongs essentially to a fitness for ends taken in its full compass. This latter condition of fitness—which one could designate the culture of training (discipline)—has a negative character, residing in freeing the will from the despotism of the desires; for, riveted to certain natural things, we are thereby made unable to make our own choice, since we allow the drives to serve us as shackles that nature appended to us merely in the stead of guiding threads, in order that we not neglect, or even do harm to, the vocation of the animality within us, though we remain free enough to draw them tighter or to relax them, to prolong or to curtail them, in keeping with what the ends of reason call for.

Skill can hardly be developed in the human species otherwise than by means of inequality among human beings: for the greatest number provide, as it were mechanically and without requiring any special art for it, the necessities of life for the comfort and leisure of others, who work at the less necessary parts of culture, science and art, and are kept by these in a condition of oppression, bitter labor, and little enjoyment—a class to which, however, much of the culture of the higher one does gradually spread as well. The plagues, however, mount up as that progress advances (its summit, once the leaning toward the superfluous starts to curtail the indispensable, going by the name of luxury), growing on both sides with equal force—on the one from the violence of others, on the other from an inner want of contentment; yet this resplendent wretchedness does after all go together with the unfolding of the natural predispositions in the human species, and nature's own end, granted it is not an end of ours, is for all that reached in the process. That formal condition whereby nature is able, and only so, to reach this ultimate intention of hers is the sort of constitution among human beings in their mutual relations in which a lawful power within a whole—termed civil society—is opposed to the mutual curtailment of their conflicting freedoms; for it is within such a whole alone that the fullest unfolding of the natural predispositions can come about. For this, however, there would still be required—even were human beings clever enough to discover it and wise enough to submit willingly to its constraint—a cosmopolitan whole, that is, a system of all states that are in danger of acting detrimentally upon one another. Where such a whole is wanting, and in the face of the obstacle that the cravings for honor, for mastery, and for possessions—chiefly among those in whose hands power lies—throw up against the mere possibility of any such plan, war (in part the kind wherein states fracture and break up into smaller ones, in part the kind wherein one state strives to annex others lesser than itself and to shape a greater whole) becomes inescapable: war which, however much it is an unintended attempt on the part of human beings (spurred by ungoverned passions), is yet a deeply concealed and perhaps designed attempt of the highest wisdom—to prepare, if not indeed to establish, lawfulness together with the freedom of states, and by that route the unity of a system of them founded on morality, and which, for all the most dreadful afflictions it lays upon the human race, and the perhaps greater ones still that the unceasing readiness for it imposes in time of peace, remains nevertheless one more spring driving all the talents that serve culture to their highest pitch of development (even as the hope for the tranquility of a people's happiness withdraws ever farther off).

As for the discipline of the inclinations—for which the natural predisposition is, in view of our vocation as an animal species, quite purposive, but which greatly hinder the development of humanity—here too, in respect of this second requirement for culture, there shows itself a purposive striving of nature toward a cultivation that makes us receptive to higher ends than nature itself can supply. The preponderance of the ills that the refinement of taste, carried to the point of its idealization, and even luxury in the sciences, as a nourishment for vanity, pour out over us through the insatiable multitude of the inclinations thereby engendered, is not to be disputed; but on the other hand the end of nature is likewise not to be mistaken—to win ever more ground away from the rawness and vehemence of those inclinations that belong more to the animality in us and are most opposed to our cultivation toward our higher vocation (the inclinations of enjoyment), and to make room for the development of humanity. Fine art and the sciences, which through a pleasure that admits of universal communication, and through polish and refinement for society, make human beings, if not morally better, then at least civilized, win a great deal away from the tyranny of sensuous propensity and thereby prepare human beings for a sovereignty in which reason alone is to hold power: while the ills with which nature on the one part, and the incompatible selfishness of human beings on the other, afflict us at the same time summon up, heighten, and steel the powers of the soul not to succumb to those ills, and thus let us feel a fitness for higher ends that lies hidden within us.³⁰

§ 84. On the final end of a world's existence — that is, of creation itself

Final end is the end that requires no other to furnish the condition of its possibility.

If, to account for the purposiveness of nature, one assumes its mere mechanism as the ground of explanation, then one cannot ask what the things in the world are there for; for on such an idealistic system it is then only a question of the physical possibility of the things (to think of which as ends would be a mere sophistry without an object): whether one now attributes this form of the things to chance or to a blind necessity, in both cases that question would remain empty. If, however, we regard the connection of ends in the world as something real and grant it a causality of its own peculiar kind — namely that of a cause acting intentionally — then the question cannot rest with why the world's things (organized beings) possess this or that form, or stand placed by nature in these or those relations to others; for since an understanding is here being thought — one to which the possibility of the forms actually encountered in things has to be traced back as to their cause — then in that same understanding we must also inquire after the objective ground capable of having determined this productive understanding toward an effect of that kind — a ground which is then the final end for which things of the like are present.

I said above that the final end is no end for effecting which, and for bringing forth in conformity with the idea of which, nature would be sufficient, since it is unconditioned. For within nature (as a being of sense) there is nothing whose determining ground, itself lying in nature, would not always be conditioned anew in its turn; and this is true not only of the nature outside us (the material one) but likewise of the nature within us (the thinking one): with the proviso, of course, that I am regarding in myself only what belongs to nature. A thing, however, which by reason of its objective constitution must necessarily exist as the final end of a cause endowed with understanding, has to be of such a nature that, in the order of ends, it depends upon no other condition than its idea alone.

Now we have only a single kind of being in the world whose causality is teleological, i.e., directed toward ends, and yet is at the same time so constituted that the law by which they must determine ends for themselves is represented by them as unconditioned and independent of any natural condition, though in itself as necessary. A being of this kind is the human being, yet taken as noumenon — the sole natural being in whom we can, from the side of its own constitution, come to cognize a supersensible faculty (freedom), and indeed the law of causality along with the object belonging to it, an object it is able to hold before itself as its supreme end (the highest good in the world).

Of the human being, now — and likewise of every rational being in the world — insofar as he is a moral being, one can inquire no further as to the end (quem in finem) for which he exists. His existence has the highest end itself within it, to which, so far as he is able, he can subject the whole of nature, or at least in defiance of which he is not permitted to count himself subject to any natural influence. — Now if the things of the world, being dependent as regards their existence, require a supreme cause that acts according to ends, then the human being is creation's final end; for without him the chain of mutually subordinated ends would lack a complete foundation, and it is only in the human being — and even in him only as the subject of morality — that we meet with the unconditioned legislation with respect to ends, the legislation that alone therefore renders him capable of being a final end under which the whole of nature stands teleologically subordinated³¹.

§ 85. On physicotheology

Physicotheology is reason's attempt to infer, from the ends of nature (which can only be cognized empirically), the supreme cause of nature and its properties. A moral theology, or ethicotheology, would instead undertake to reason back to that cause and its properties from the moral end belonging to rational beings within nature—an end that admits of being cognized a priori.

The former naturally comes before the latter. For should we wish, by teleological inference, to pass from the things of the world up to a world-cause, natural ends have to be presented to us at the outset, ends for which we must afterward look for a final end, and for that final end, in turn, the principle governing the causality of this supreme cause.

In accordance with the teleological principle, many investigations of nature can and must be carried out without our having any occasion to ask after the ground of the possibility of acting purposively, which we encounter in various of the products of nature. But if we should now wish to possess a concept of this as well, then for that purpose we command no insight reaching any further than simply the maxim of the reflecting power of judgment: namely, that were even a solitary organic product of nature to be presented to us, the character of our faculty of cognition would let us conceive, as its ground, none other than a cause belonging to nature itself (be it to the whole of nature or only to this fragment of it) that holds within it, through understanding, the causality for producing such a thing; a principle for judging that, while advancing us not one step in accounting for natural things and how they arise, does nevertheless throw open to us, past the bounds of nature, a certain vista, whereby the concept of an original being—elsewhere so infertile—might perhaps be given a closer determination.

Now I maintain: physicotheology, no matter how far one may drive it, can still reveal to us nothing regarding a final end of creation; for it fails even to arrive at the question concerning such an end. It can, admittedly, vindicate the concept of an intelligent world-cause as one that is subjectively serviceable—for the make-up of our faculty of cognition and it alone—for the possibility of those things that we are able to render comprehensible to ourselves by way of ends, yet it is powerless to specify this concept any further, be the intent theoretical or practical; and its endeavor never attains its aim of establishing a theology, but forever stays a mere physical teleology: for within it the bearing on ends is, and has to be, taken always as something conditioned within nature; whence it can never so much as broach the end for the sake of which nature itself exists (whose ground has to be sought outside nature), upon whose determinate idea the determinate concept of that higher intelligent world-cause, and thus the very possibility of a theology, nonetheless hinges.

For what purpose the things in the world serve one another; for what purpose the manifold within a single thing is good for that thing itself; how one even comes to have ground for supposing that nothing whatever in the world exists to no purpose, but rather that everything, in nature, is good for something or other, granted the condition that certain things (as ends) ought to exist—so that for the power of judgment our reason accordingly has within its capacity no principle for the possibility of the object of its inescapable teleological judging save this one, that it place the mechanism of nature under the architectonic of an understanding-endowed author of the world: all of this the teleological survey of the world performs most gloriously and to our extreme admiration. But seeing that the data—and therewith the principles—by which that concept of an intelligent world-cause (as the highest artificer) is to be determined are of a purely empirical sort, they permit the inference of no properties beyond those which experience unveils to us in the effects of that cause; and experience, incapable as it ever is of embracing the whole of nature as a system, must again and again come up against grounds of proof that, to all appearance, are at variance both with that concept and with one another—grounds that can never, not even were we competent to survey the entire system empirically, so far as it is mere nature, elevate us beyond nature to the end of its own existence, and by that means to the determinate concept of that loftier intelligence.

If one makes small the task whose solution is the business of a physicotheology, its solution appears easy. For if one squanders the concept of a divinity on every intelligent being we might conceive, of which there may be one or several, possessing many and very great, yet precisely not all, of the properties that are required for founding a nature in agreement with the greatest possible end; or if one thinks it nothing to make good, in a theory, the deficiency of what the grounds of proof achieve by means of arbitrary additions, and, wherever one has ground merely to assume much perfection (and what is much for us?), holds oneself entitled to presuppose all possible perfection: then physical teleology makes weighty claims to the glory of grounding a theology. But when it is demanded that one indicate what, then, drives us and moreover entitles us to make those additions, we shall seek in vain, among the principles of the theoretical use of reason—which absolutely demands that in explaining an object of experience one ascribe to it no more properties than empirical data for its possibility are to be found—for any ground for our justification. On closer examination we would see that in truth an idea of a highest being, resting on a quite different use of reason (the practical), lies at the ground in us a priori, an idea that drives us to make good the deficient representation of a physical teleology of the original ground of ends in nature up to the concept of a divinity; and we would not falsely imagine that we had brought about this idea—and with it a theology—through the theoretical use of reason applied to physical knowledge of the world, still less that we had proved its reality.

One cannot count it so severely to the ancients' blame that they thought of their gods as very manifoldly different, partly in respect of their powers and partly in respect of their intentions and dispositions of will, yet all of them—their supreme head not excepted—as still restricted in a human manner. For when they contemplated the constitution and the course of things in nature, they certainly found grounds enough to posit, as the cause thereof, something beyond the merely mechanical, and to surmise, behind the machinery of this world, the designs of certain superior causes that they were unable to conceive except as superhuman. But since they met with good and evil, the purposive and the counterpurposive, so thoroughly intermixed within it—at least so far as our insight reaches—and could not allow themselves, all the same, to posit for the sake of the arbitrary idea of a supremely perfect author certain wise and benevolent ends lying secretly at the ground, ends for which they nonetheless saw no proof: their verdict upon the supreme world-cause could scarcely have come out any differently, in so far, that is, as they proceeded with full consistency in keeping with maxims belonging to the purely theoretical employment of reason. Others again, whose ambition was to be at once natural scientists and theologians, imagined that reason could be satisfied if they provided—by means of the idea of a being in which, as the sole substance, all those natural things would exist merely as inhering determinations—for the absolute unity of the principle of natural things that reason demands: a substance which, though not the cause of the world through any understanding, would nonetheless be the subject in which all the understanding of the world's beings is to be met with; consequently a being that, though producing nothing according to ends, would still be one wherein all things, by virtue of the unity of the subject of which they are mere determinations, were bound of necessity—even apart from any end or intention—to relate to one another purposively. In this way they brought in the idealism of final causes: for they converted the unity—so difficult to elicit—of a plurality of purposively linked substances from a causal dependence on one thing into the inherence in one thing; and this system, viewed subsequently from the side of the inhering beings of the world as pantheism, and from the side of the solely subsisting subject qua original being (at a later date) as Spinozism, did not so much settle the question about the first ground of nature's purposiveness as instead pronounce it void, since that latter concept, stripped of every bit of its reality, was reduced to a mere misreading of a general ontological concept of a thing as such.

On merely theoretical principles for the use of reason (the sole foundation on which physicotheology rests), one can accordingly never elicit a concept of a divinity that would suffice for our teleological judging of nature. For we either pronounce the whole of teleology a mere illusion on the part of the power of judgment as it judges the causal connection of things, and flee to the single principle of a bare mechanism of nature, which—by reason of the unity of the substance whose determinations, in their manifoldness, are all that nature is said to be—merely gives us the appearance of harboring a general relation to ends; or else, choosing to hold fast to the principle of realism regarding this special sort of causality rather than to the aforementioned idealism of final causes, we may set beneath natural ends either a multiplicity of intelligent original beings or but a single such being: yet once, for grounding the concept of it, we have nothing at our disposal beyond principles of experience taken from the actual linkage of ends in the world, then on the one side we can devise no remedy against the discord that nature, as regards the unity of ends, exhibits across many examples, while on the other we can never derive from all this a concept of one single intelligent cause—arrived at as we do arrive at it, warranted by mere experience alone—determinate enough to serve any theology whatsoever, in whichever manner, be it theoretical or practical, that theology might be put to use.

Physical teleology does, to be sure, spur us on to look for a theology, yet it is unable to bring one forth, however far we may trace nature by way of experience and lend our support—through ideas of reason (which, applied to physical tasks, are bound to be theoretical)—to the connection of ends we have uncovered within it. What use is it, one will rightly complain, that we lay a great understanding, one immeasurable for us, at the basis of all these arrangements and let it order this world according to its intentions? when nature tells us nothing of the final intention, nor ever can, without which we can yet make for ourselves no common point of reference for all these natural ends, no sufficient teleological principle, whether for cognizing the ends collectively in one system, or for making for ourselves, of the supreme understanding as the cause of such a nature, a concept that could serve our power of judgment, as it reflects teleologically upon that nature, as a measure. I would in that case indeed have an understanding of art for scattered ends, but no wisdom for a final end, which yet must properly contain the determining ground of the former. Yet in default of a final end—one that pure reason alone can supply a priori (since every end in the world is empirically conditioned and can hold nothing beyond what is good for this or that purpose as a contingent aim, never what is good without qualification), and one that alone could instruct me which properties, which degree, and which proportion I must ascribe in thought to the supreme cause of nature so as to judge it as a teleological system: with what warrant, and how, am I here to enlarge as I please my very confined concept of that primordial understanding (a concept I can rest only on my meager acquaintance with the world), stretching it—out of the power of this original being to make its ideas actual, out of its will to do so, and so forth—clear up to the idea of an all-wise, infinite being? Were this to be undertaken theoretically, it would presuppose omniscience in my own self, so that I might see into the ends of nature in their whole interconnection and, over and above that, be able to conceive every other possible plan against which the present one would have, on good grounds, to be judged the best. For short of such a completed cognition of the effect, I am unable to arrive at any determinate concept of the supreme cause—a concept discoverable solely in that of an intelligence unlimited in every regard, which is to say the concept of a divinity—and so to erect a groundwork for theology.

We may therefore, however far physical teleology be extended, safely state, in keeping with the principle adduced above: that the makeup and governing principles of our cognitive power leave us able to conceive nature, in those purposive arrangements of it that have come to our knowledge, in no manner other than as the work of an understanding to which nature stands subordinated. But whether that understanding, in producing the whole of nature, may besides have entertained some final intention (one that would then not reside within the nature of the sensible world): this is something the theoretical study of nature can never lay open to us; rather, for all our knowledge of nature it stays unsettled whether that supreme cause is the original ground of nature everywhere in view of a final end, or is so instead through an understanding that the sheer necessity of its own nature determines toward the bringing-forth of certain forms (on the analogy of what, in the case of animals, we term the artistic instinct)—and this without any need, on that score, to credit it even with wisdom, much less with a highest wisdom bound up with all the further properties needed for the perfection of its product.

Physicotheology, then, is a misconstrued physical teleology, serviceable solely as a preparation (propaedeutic) for theology, and equal to that purpose only once a principle of another kind is added on which it may lean—never of itself, though its very name would have it so.