§ 87. On the moral proof of the existence of God

A physical teleology exists, one that supplies our theoretically reflecting power of judgment with a ground of proof adequate for supposing that an intelligent world-cause exists. Yet we likewise discover within ourselves — and even more so in the concept, quite generally, of a rational being endowed with freedom (with a causality of its own) — a moral teleology as well; but since the relation to ends within us is settled a priori along with its law, and so admits of being cognized as necessary, this teleology has no need, for the present purpose, of an intelligent cause outside us to account for that inner lawfulness: no more than, upon finding something purposive in the geometrical properties of figures (serviceable for every sort of possible artistic practice), we are entitled to look past them to a highest understanding that bestows this upon them. Still, this moral teleology does bear upon us insofar as we are beings of the world and hence beings bound up with other things within it: things toward which — whether as ends, or as objects with respect to which we ourselves are the final end — the very same moral laws enjoin us to direct our judging. Now from this moral teleology — bearing as it does upon how our own causality stands related to ends, and indeed to a final end we are obliged to purpose within the world, and likewise upon the world's reciprocal bearing on that ethical end and the external possibility of its accomplishment (something for which no physical teleology can afford us any guidance) — there arises the unavoidable question: whether it constrains our rational appraisal to reach out past the world and, for that relation of nature to the moral within us, to search out an intelligent supreme principle, so as to represent nature to ourselves as likewise purposive in relation to the inner moral legislation and the possible carrying-out thereof. Accordingly a moral teleology does indeed exist; and it coheres, with the very same necessity, with the nomothetics of freedom on one hand and, on the other, with that of nature — coheres as civil law-giving does with the question of where one is to look for the executive power, and as, quite generally, a connection holds wherever reason is called upon to state a principle for the actuality of some law-governed ordering of things, possible only according to ideas. — We shall begin by laying out how reason advances from that moral teleology, and from its bearing upon the physical one, up to theology, and only afterward take up considerations concerning the possibility and conclusiveness of this mode of inference.

Suppose one takes the existence of certain things — or merely of certain forms of things — to be contingent, and thus possible only through something else acting as their cause: then, for this causality, one may look for the supreme ground, and so, for what is conditioned, the unconditioned ground, either within the physical or within the teleological order (following the nexu effectivo or the finali). In other words, the question may be posed: what is the highest cause that brings them forth? or what constitutes their supreme (wholly unconditioned) end — the final end, that is, of their being brought forth, whether of this or of all its products taken quite generally? — where it is of course taken for granted that such a cause is competent for a representation of ends, and thus an intelligent being, or must at the very least be conceived by us as operating according to the laws that govern a being of that kind.

Now should one pursue the latter order, one comes upon a principle that even the most ordinary human reason finds itself immediately compelled to endorse: that if a final end — one which reason has to specify a priori — is anywhere to have its place at all, it can be none but the human being (every rational worldly being alike) under moral laws.³² For (thus does everyone judge): were the world made up entirely of lifeless things, or even, in part, of living yet reasonless beings, the existence of such a world would carry no worth at all, since within it no being would exist that possessed the slightest concept of a worth. Were there, by contrast, rational beings too, but ones whose reason could locate the worth of things' existence solely in nature's relation to them (in their well-being), and were unable to procure such a worth originally (in freedom) for itself: then there would be, to be sure, (relative) ends in the world, yet no (absolute) final end, since the being of such rational creatures would forever remain devoid of purpose. The moral laws, however, are of that peculiar character whereby they prescribe something to reason as an end unconditionally — precisely, that is, in the manner the concept of a final end demands: and the existence of such a reason, one that in the relation to ends can be its own supreme law — put otherwise, the being of rational creatures under moral laws — is the sole thing conceivable as the final end of a world's existence. Should matters not stand thus, on the other hand, then either no end whatever underlies the existence of these beings in their cause, or ends without any final end lie at their basis.

As the formal rational condition upon our exercise of freedom, the moral law binds us of itself alone, without hanging upon any end as a material condition; but it does, besides, determine for us — and that a priori — a final end, which it makes obligatory for us to strive after: and this final end is the highest good in the world attainable through freedom.

The condition, subjective in kind, under which a human being (and, by all our concepts, every finite rational being as well) can posit a final end for itself under the law stated above, is happiness. Hence, the supreme physical good realizable in the world, the good to be advanced as a final end so far as it lies with us, is happiness: subject to the objective condition that the human being accord with the law of morality, this constituting the worthiness to be happy.

These two requirements of the final end laid upon us by the moral law, however, we find it impossible — by any of our rational faculties — to represent to ourselves as linked together through mere natural causes and as fitting the idea of the final end so conceived. Thus the concept of such an end's practical necessity, arising through the deployment of our powers, does not square with the theoretical concept of its physical possibility, the possibility of its being effected, provided we tie to our freedom no causality (of a means) beyond that of nature.

It follows that we are obliged to posit a moral cause of the world (a world-author) in order to propose to ourselves a final end conformable to the moral law; and just so far as the latter is necessary, just so far (that is, to the same degree and on the same ground) is the former also to be posited as necessary: namely, that a God exists.³³

This proof, to which the form of logical precision may readily be imparted, does not intend to say: that assuming the existence of God is exactly as necessary as acknowledging the validity of the moral law; and hence that whoever cannot bring himself to be convinced of the former might judge himself released from the obligations flowing from the latter. No! what would then have to be surrendered is merely the intention of bringing about, by compliance with the latter, that final end within the world — namely a happiness of rational beings meeting in concord with obedience to moral laws, as the supreme good of the world. Every rational being would still have to acknowledge himself as strictly bound by the precept of morals; since the laws of morals are formal, commanding unconditionally, with no regard for ends (as the matter of willing). Yet that single demand of the final end — the one which practical reason enjoins upon worldly beings — is an irresistible purpose lodged in them through their very nature (as finite beings), a purpose that reason means only to place beneath the moral law as its inviolable condition, or else to have made universal in accordance with that law, and thus it makes the furtherance of happiness in agreement with morality into the final end. This end, now — so far (as regards the former) as lies within our capacity — the moral law commands us to promote; whatever the upshot such striving may have, let it be what it will. Duty is discharged in the form taken by an earnest will, not in the mediating causes of one's succeeding.

Let us grant, then: that a man talks himself — swayed partly by the feebleness of all those so extravagantly praised speculative arguments, partly by sundry irregularities meeting him in nature and in the moral world — into the proposition: that there is no God; even so, he would in his own eyes be a worthless creature were he, on that account, to treat the laws of duty as merely fancied, void, and non-obligatory, and to make up his mind to transgress them without qualm. Such a man, even later on — should he manage in the end to become convinced of what he had at first called into doubt — would, with that cast of mind, still remain a worthless creature all the same: even though he discharged his duty, but out of fear, or from a reward-seeking motive, without any duty-revering disposition, as exactly, in point of effect, as could ever be demanded of him. Conversely, were he as a believer to follow it, by his own conviction, sincerely and without self-interest, and yet, each time he set up the case by way of trial that he might one day be convinced there is no God, straightaway to deem himself free of every moral obligation: then things must indeed stand but poorly with the inner moral disposition within him.

We may, accordingly, take an upright man (Spinoza, say) who remains firmly convinced within himself: that no God exists, and (since, as regards the object of morality, it comes out to the same result) that there is likewise no future life; how, then, will he judge his own inner destination of ends by way of the moral law, which he actively reveres? For himself he asks no advantage out of obeying it, neither in this world nor in any other; disinterestedly he seeks, rather, merely to promote the good toward whose furtherance that sacred law lends direction to all his powers. But his striving has its limits; and from nature he can look, now and again, for a fortuitous cooperation, though never for a concurrence that would arrive lawfully and by constant rules (such as his maxims inwardly are and must be) toward the end that he nevertheless feels himself obligated and impelled to bring about. Fraud, violence, and envy will forever be in full swing about him, even though he himself is honest, peaceable, and kindly disposed; and the righteous men he yet encounters beyond himself will, for all their worthiness to be happy, nonetheless be delivered up by nature — which takes no notice of this — to every ill of privation, sickness, and untimely death, no less than the other animals of the earth, and will remain so ever after, until one wide grave engulfs them one and all (upright or not, it counts for the same here) and flings them, who could believe themselves the final end of creation, back down into the gulf of the aimless chaos of matter out of which they had been drawn. — The end, then, that this well-meaning man had, and was bound to have, before his eyes in obeying the moral laws, he would assuredly have to surrender as impossible; or, if he means here too to stay faithful to the summons of his ethical inner destination, and not to let the respect which the ethical law directly breathes into him toward obedience be enfeebled by the nullity of the sole ideal final end answering to its lofty demand (which cannot come about without inflicting some damage on the moral disposition): then he must — as indeed he very well may, since the thing is at least not self-contradictory — for practical purposes, that is, so as at least to frame for himself a concept of the possibility of the final end morally prescribed to him, posit the existence of a moral world-author, that is, of God.

§ 88. Restriction of the validity of the moral proof

Pure reason, taken as a practical faculty — namely as the power to govern, through ideas (pure concepts of reason), how our causality is freely employed — does more than harbor within the moral law a merely regulative principle of our conduct: by that same law it furnishes us at once with a subjectively constitutive one, seated in the concept of an object thinkable by reason alone, an object that our deeds are meant to render actual in the world according to that law. Accordingly, when freedom is exercised under moral laws, the idea of a final end belonging to it carries a reality that is subjectively practical. Reason determines us a priori to promote with every power at our command the world's highest good, a good lying in the conjunction of the greatest well-being of the world's rational beings with the highest condition of goodness in them — namely, universal happiness joined to a morality maximally conformable to law. In this final end the possibility of the one part, namely happiness, is empirically conditioned, that is, dependent on the constitution of nature (on whether it accords with this end or not) and in theoretical respect problematic; whereas the other part, namely morality, with respect to which we are free from the cooperation of nature, is, as to its possibility, firmly settled a priori and dogmatically certain. For the concept of a final end of the world's rational beings to attain objective theoretical reality, then, two things are demanded: that we ourselves have a final end prescribed to us a priori, and further that creation, that is, the world itself, possess a final end in respect of its existence — something which, could it be established a priori, would supply the final end's subjective reality with an objective one besides. For should creation have any final end whatever, no other conception of it is open to us than that it has to agree with the moral one (which by itself first makes the concept of an end possible). Now we do indeed find ends in the world: and physical teleology exhibits them to such a degree that, if we judge in conformity with reason, we ultimately have grounds for adopting, as a principle for the investigation of nature, that nothing whatever in nature is without an end; yet the final end of nature we seek in vain within nature itself. This end therefore can and must, just as the idea of it lies only in reason, be sought, even as regards its objective possibility, solely in rational beings. But the practical reason of the latter not only specifies this final end, it also determines this concept with respect to the conditions under which a final end of the creation can be thought by us at all.

It now becomes a question whether the objective reality of the concept of a final end of creation might not likewise be exhibited adequately for the theoretical requirements of pure reason — not, admittedly, with apodictic force for the determining power of judgment, yet well enough for the maxims by which the theoretically reflecting power of judgment proceeds. That is the very least one may demand of speculative philosophy, which pledges itself to link the ethical end to the ends of nature through the idea of one sole end; and yet even so slight a demand still far outstrips anything it can ever deliver.

Following the principle of the theoretically reflecting power of judgment, our statement would run thus: Should we have grounds for positing behind nature's purposive products a supreme cause of nature — one whose causality, as regards the actuality of those products (creation), must be thought as of another kind than the mechanism of nature calls for, that is, as the causality of an understanding — then we shall equally have grounds enough to attribute to this primordial being not merely ends dispersed everywhere in nature but a final end besides; not so as to demonstrate that such a being exists, but at all events (as was done in physical teleology) to convince ourselves that the possibility of such a world becomes intelligible to us not through ends alone, but solely by our laying a final end at the basis of its existence.

Yet a final end is merely a concept of our practical reason, one that can neither be inferred from any data of experience for the sake of judging nature theoretically nor be brought into connection with any cognition of nature. This concept admits of no employment whatever, save purely for practical reason acting under moral laws; and creation's final end is that character of the world which agrees with the one thing we can lay down determinately by laws, namely the final end of our pure practical reason, precisely insofar as it is meant to be practical. — Now the moral law, in laying this latter end upon us, gives us for practical purposes — that is, so that we may direct our powers toward realizing it — a ground for supposing its possibility and feasibility, and hence too (for its realization would be impossible were nature not to concur in a condition of it that lies beyond our control) a constitution of things attuned to that end. We thus have a moral ground for thinking, for a world, a final end of the creation as well.

Here we do not yet have the step that leads from moral teleology over to a theology — that is, to a moral world-author's existing — but only to a final end of creation as determined along these lines. That for this creation, then — that is, for the existence of things in keeping with a final end — one must posit, in the first place, an intelligent being, and, in the second, not merely (as with the possibility of nature's things, which we found ourselves obliged to judge as ends) an intelligent one, but a being who is at once moral as author of the world, and thus a God: this constitutes a second inference, and one so constituted that one sees it to be passed solely for the power of judgment under concepts of practical reason, and, being such a verdict, for the reflecting and not the determining power of judgment. We cannot, after all, arrogate to ourselves the insight that, even though within us moral-practical reason differs essentially in its principles from the technical-practical, matters must stand the same way in the world's supreme cause once it is taken as an intelligence, so that a peculiar and separate kind of causality would be needed in it for a final end beyond what mere ends of nature demand; and hence that in our final end we possess not only a moral ground for positing a final end of creation (as its effect), but likewise a moral being as creation's primordial ground. We can, however, indeed say: that in accordance with the constitution of our rational faculty we cannot in any way make comprehensible to ourselves the possibility of such a purposiveness, related to the moral law and its object, as is present in this final end, without a world-author and ruler who is at the same time a moral legislator.

That a supreme, morally legislating author is real has thus been sufficiently shown only for the practical use of our reason, without anything being theoretically determined regarding his existence. For reason, if its end is to be possible — an end laid upon us in any case by its own legislation — stands in need of an idea whereby the hindrance stemming from our inability to fulfill that end under the mere natural concept of the world is removed (which suffices for the reflecting power of judgment); and by this the idea takes on practical reality, notwithstanding that every means of securing it such reality in a theoretical respect, toward explaining nature and determining the supreme cause, is altogether lacking to it as regards speculative cognition. In the eyes of the theoretically reflecting power of judgment, physical teleology gave adequate proof, out of nature's ends, of an intelligent cause of the world; for the practical, moral teleology brings this about by means of the concept of a final end that it finds itself constrained to assign to creation in a practical respect. The objective reality of the idea of God, as moral world-author, admittedly cannot be established by physical ends alone; and yet, once the cognition of these is joined to that of the moral, the former — in accordance with pure reason's maxim of pursuing unity of principles so far as this can be carried out — become highly significant for lending support to that idea's practical reality by way of the reality it already possesses, in a theoretical respect, for the power of judgment.

Here it is now, for the prevention of a readily arising misunderstanding, most necessary to remark that we can, first, think these properties of the highest being only by analogy. For how should we investigate its nature, of which experience can show us nothing similar? Secondly, that by this analogy we also merely think it, and cannot cognize it thereby and, say, ascribe those properties to it theoretically; for that would be a task for the determining power of judgment, in the speculative aim of our reason, of gaining insight into what the supreme cause of the world is in itself. Here, however, it is solely a matter of what concept we are to form of it in keeping with how our cognitive faculties are constituted, and whether its existence has to be assumed by us, in order likewise to procure merely practical reality for an end that pure practical reason, apart from any such presupposition, lays upon us a priori to accomplish with all our powers, that is, in order to be able to think an intended effect as possible. That concept may well be extravagant for speculative reason ; the properties, too, that we ascribe to the being thereby thought may, used objectively, conceal an anthropomorphism within themselves: yet the aim of their use is not to wish to determine its nature, which is unattainable for us, but rather to give determination to ourselves and to our own will in keeping with it. In the same way that we designate a cause by the concept we hold of its effect (though only as concerns its relation to that effect), without thereby aiming to settle its inner constitution from within by means of the properties that alone can make such causes known to us and that experience must supply; and just as, say, we attribute to the soul, among other powers, a vim locomotivam, since bodily movements genuinely arise whose source lies in its representations, without on that account wishing to credit it with the sole manner in which moving forces are familiar to us (that is, through attraction, pressure, and impact, and so through motion, each of which invariably presupposes an extended being): — just so shall we be obliged to posit something harboring the ground of the possibility, and of the practical reality (that is, the feasibility), of a necessary moral final end; this being, however, we may — going by the character of the effect looked for from it — conceive as a wise being governing the world by moral laws, and, as befits the makeup of our cognitive faculties, we must conceive it as a cause of things set apart from nature, purely in order to articulate the relation in which this being, surpassing every one of our cognitive faculties, stands to the object of our practical reason: yet without meaning, on that ground, to ascribe to it theoretically the one causality of this kind known to us, namely an understanding and a will, nor even to draw within this being itself an objective distinction between the causality thought in it with regard to what is for us the final end and the causality bearing on nature (and its determinations of ends generally), but able rather to admit this distinction only as subjectively necessary for how our faculty of cognition is constituted and as valid for the reflecting, not for the objectively determining, power of judgment. Where the practical is at stake, however, a regulative principle of this kind (bearing on prudence or wisdom) — enjoining us to act as befits ends toward whatever, by the constitution of our cognitive faculties, we can think possible only in one determinate way — is simultaneously constitutive, that is, practically determining; whereas that very same principle, employed to judge the objective possibility of things, is in no way theoretically determining (as if the object too were to admit only that one kind of possibility which our faculty of thought admits), figuring instead as a purely regulative principle that serves the reflecting power of judgment.

Remark.

The present moral proof is by no means a newly devised one; at most it is a ground of proof newly set forth, for it lay within the rational faculty of man already before that faculty's first stirrings, and with the ongoing cultivation of that faculty it merely unfolds ever further. The moment human beings first set about reflecting on right and wrong — in an age when they still passed over the purposiveness of nature with indifference, exploiting it while imagining nothing in it beyond nature's habitual course — a judgment was bound to force itself upon them: that in the end it could surely never come to the same thing whether a man had conducted himself uprightly or falsely, equitably or by violence, even should he, clear to the close of his life and at least outwardly, have met with no fortune rewarding his virtues nor any penalty for his crimes. It is as though they perceived within themselves a voice declaring that things must turn out otherwise; and hence there must also have lain hidden the representation, however obscure, of something that they felt bound to strive after, with which such an outcome could not at all be reconciled, or with which, once they regarded the course of the world as the sole order of things, they were again unable to unite that inner determination of ends of their mind. Now, in whatever manner and however still so crudely they might represent to themselves how such an irregularity (which to the human mind is bound to be far more offensive than the blind chance that one might perhaps wish to lay at the basis of the judging of nature as its principle) could be redressed, they could nevertheless never conceive of any other principle of the possibility of nature's being united with their inner moral law than a highest cause that rules the world in accordance with moral laws: for a final end laid upon them as a duty within them, and a nature devoid of any final end outside them, in which that end is nonetheless to become actual, stand in mutual contradiction. About the inner constitution of that cause of the world they might now hatch much nonsense; that moral relation within the governance of the world remained ever the same, one universally graspable by the least cultivated reason, insofar as it regards itself as practical, but with which, by contrast, speculative reason cannot by far keep equal pace. — Very probably, moreover, it was this moral interest that first stirred attention toward the beauty and the ends of nature; and though such attention then served splendidly to fortify that idea, it could neither establish it nor, still less, do without it, for even the study of nature's ends takes on that immediate interest — the interest displayed so abundantly in our admiration of nature, apart from any benefit to be gained from it — only through its bearing on the final end.

§ 89. On the use of the moral argument

Confining reason—in respect of all our ideas of the supersensible—to the terms on which it may be put to practical use carries, where the idea of God is at stake, an undeniable advantage: it keeps theology from soaring off into theosophy (into extravagant concepts that throw reason into confusion), and from sinking down into demonology (a way of picturing the highest being on the model of man); it keeps religion from straying into theurgy (the fanatical delusion that one might sense other supersensible beings and, reciprocally, work an influence upon them), or into idolatry (the superstitious delusion that one might become pleasing to the highest being through some means apart from a moral cast of mind)³⁴.

For if one grants to the vanity or the overreach of hair-splitting reason the license to settle even the slightest matter theoretically (and so as to enlarge cognition) about what lies past the world of sense; if one allows it to boast of insights into the existence and constitution of the divine nature, into its understanding and will, the laws of both, and the attributes that issue from these upon the world: then I would genuinely wish to be shown at which spot, and along what line, one means to fence in the pretensions of reason; for from whatever quarter those insights were fetched, that same quarter can surely furnish yet more of them (so long as one bent one's thinking to the task, as one imagines one might). The drawing of limits to such claims would surely have to follow from some settled principle, and not simply from our finding that every attempt of the kind has so far come to nothing; for a record of failure up to now settles nothing about whether a happier issue might yet be reached. But here no principle is possible except to assume either: that with regard to the supersensible absolutely nothing at all can be determined theoretically (except merely negatively), or that our reason contains within itself an as yet unmined lode of who-knows-how-great cognition-extending items of knowledge, held in reserve for us and our descendants. — Where religion is concerned, however, i.e., morality taken in relation to God as lawgiver: then, supposing the theoretical cognition of him had to go first, morality would be made to fall in line with theology, and not merely would an outward and arbitrary law-giving by a supreme being supplant an inward and necessary law-giving of reason, but whatever is defective in our insight into his nature would also reach through to the moral precept, and so would render religion immoral and turn it upside down.

Touching the hope of a life hereafter, should we—rather than the final end that we are ourselves to accomplish as the prescription of the moral law directs—turn to our theoretical power of cognition for the thread guiding the judgment of reason about our vocation (a judgment, then, held necessary or worthy of acceptance only in a practical bearing), the doctrine of the soul affords, to this end, exactly as theology did above, no more than a negative concept of the being that thinks within us: namely, that not one of its acts, nor any appearance of inner sense, admits of a materialist explanation; and hence that, as to its detached nature and the persistence or non-persistence of its personhood beyond death, no cognition-enlarging, determining judgment on speculative grounds is at all open to us through the whole of our theoretical power of cognition. Since, then, everything here is consigned to a teleological judging of our being, made under a practically necessary consideration, and to the supposition of our lasting on, this being the condition demanded for that final end which reason lays upon us without qualification, there comes to light at the same stroke the advantage (which at first sight does look like a forfeiture): that, just as theology can for us never turn into theosophy , so rational psychology can never turn into pneumatology as a science that enlarges cognition, while on the other side it stands equally safeguarded against sliding into any materialism; that it is rather no more than an anthropology of the inner sense, i.e., an acquaintance with our thinking self during life, and, treated as theoretical cognition, likewise stays merely empirical; whereas rational psychology, once the question bears on our eternal existence, is no theoretical science whatever, but hangs upon one solitary inference of moral teleology, just as its whole employment is needed only for the sake of the latter, i.e., of our practical vocation.

§ 90. On the mode of holding-to-be-true in a teleological proof of the existence of God

To begin with, for every proof — whether it be conducted (as in proof by observation of the object or by experiment) through immediate empirical exhibition of what is to be proved, or through reason a priori from principles — it is required that it not persuade but convince, or at least work toward conviction; that is, that the ground of proof, or the inference, be not merely a subjective (aesthetic) determining ground of assent (mere semblance), but instead something objectively valid, a logical ground of cognition: since otherwise the understanding gets ensnared rather than genuinely won over. Of that sort of a specious proof is the one that is conducted in natural theology perhaps with good intent, yet with deliberate concealment of its weakness: when one draws in the great mass of evidences for an origin of natural things according to the principle of ends and turns to advantage the merely subjective ground of human reason, namely its peculiar propensity — wherever this can be done without contradiction — to think a single principle in place of many, and, where in this principle only some or even many requisites for the determination of a concept are met with, to think in the rest, so as to complete the concept of the thing by an arbitrary supplement. For indeed, given that we come upon so many products in nature which for us signal an intelligent cause: why, rather than many such causes, should we not sooner think a single one, and attribute to it not merely great understanding, power, and the like, but rather all-wisdom and omnipotence — in short, conceive it as a being harboring the ground that suffices, for every possible thing, for such properties? and moreover invest this one all-capable original being with understanding not only in respect of nature's laws and products, but likewise, as a moral world-cause, with the supreme ethical practical reason; for through such a rounding-out of the concept there is specified a principle adequate at once to insight into nature and to moral wisdom, and not even a remotely well-founded objection can be brought against the possibility of an idea of this kind? If at the same time the moral incentives of the mind are here set in motion and a lively interest of the latter is added with rhetorical force (of which they are indeed well worthy): then there arises from this a persuasion of the objective sufficiency of the proof, and a semblance (in most cases of its use also a salutary one) that raises itself entirely above any examination of its logical rigor and even bears abhorrence and repugnance against such examination, as if a sacrilegious doubt lay at its foundation. — Now against this there is indeed nothing to be said, so far as one really has regard to popular usefulness. Yet since the dissection of it into the two heterogeneous pieces that this argument contains, namely into that which belongs to physical and that which belongs to moral teleology, neither can nor may be prevented — inasmuch as the fusing together of the two makes it unrecognizable where the actual nerve of the proof lies, and on which part and how it would have to be worked out in order, for its validity, before the most rigorous examination to be able to hold its ground (even if on one part one should be compelled to concede the weakness of our rational insight): so it is the philosopher's duty (granted that he even counted the demand of sincerity upon him as nothing) to uncover the semblance, however salutary, that such a mingling can produce, and to separate what belongs merely to persuasion from what leads to conviction (both being determinations of assent distinguished not merely in degree but even in kind), in order to present openly the state of mind in this proof in its full purity and to be able to submit it candidly to the strictest examination.

A proof, however, that is directed at conviction can in turn be of two kinds: either such a proof as would make out what the object may be in itself, or else what, for us (human beings at large), it is according to the principles of reason necessary for us in the judging of it (a proof κατ' αληθειαν or κατ' ανθρωπον, the latter word taken in the general signification of human beings as such). In the first case its foundation lies in principles adequate for the determining power of judgment; in the second, only for the reflecting power of judgment. In this latter instance, since it rests on merely theoretical principles, it can never operate toward conviction; if, however, it makes a practical principle of reason its basis (one that consequently holds universally and necessarily), then it may fairly lay claim to a conviction adequate for a purely practical intent — that is, a moral conviction. A proof, though, works toward conviction without yet convincing, so long as it is merely led along the road toward it — that is, so long as it holds within itself none but objective grounds for the purpose, grounds which, though not yet adequate to certainty, are for all that of such a sort that they do not, as mere subjective grounds of the judgment, minister to persuasion.

Now all theoretical grounds of proof suffice either: 1) for proof through logically rigorous inferences of reason; or, where this is not the case, 2) for inference by analogy; or, should even this perhaps not obtain, still 3) for probable opinion; or finally, which is the least, 4) for the assumption of a merely possible ground of explanation, as hypothesis. — Now I assert this: that no grounds of proof whatsoever which work toward theoretical conviction are able to produce a holding-to-be-true of this kind, in any degree of it from the highest down to the lowest, if the proposition affirming the existence of an original being — a God in the signification befitting the whole import of this concept, that is, as a moral originator of the world, and hence in such fashion that by means of him the final end of creation is thereby specified — is what is to be demonstrated.

1) As regards the logically legitimate proof that advances from the universal to the particular, the Critique has established well enough that, seeing that the concept of a being which must be looked for outside nature has corresponding to it no intuition available to us — so that this concept, in so far as one would determine it theoretically by means of synthetic predicates, stays for us perpetually problematic — no cognition of such a being can occur at all (a cognition that would enlarge the compass of our theoretical knowing even slightly), and the special concept of a supersensible being admits of no subsumption whatever under the general principles governing the nature of things, in a way that would let us reason from the latter to it; for those principles are valid only for nature taken as an object of the senses.

2) One can, to be sure, of two heterogeneous things, precisely at the point of their heterogeneity, nonetheless think one of them by an analogy³⁵ with the other; but from that in which they are heterogeneous one cannot infer by analogy from the one to the other, that is, transfer this mark of the specific difference to the other. Thus I can, by analogy with the law of the equality of action and reaction in the reciprocal attraction and repulsion of bodies with one another, think as well the fellowship of the members of a common polity in accordance with rules of right; yet those specific determinations (material attraction or repulsion) I may not carry over to the latter and assign them to the citizens so as to make up a system that goes by the name of a state. — In the same way we are surely permitted to conceive the causality of the original being, with respect to the things of the world as natural ends, on the analogy of an understanding, taken as the source of the forms belonging to certain products that we term works of art (for this is undertaken solely on behalf of that theoretical or practical use of our faculty of cognition which we are to make of this concept, following a certain principle, with respect to the natural things in the world): yet from the fact that, among beings in the world, understanding must be attributed to the cause of an effect judged to be artificial, we may by no means conclude, on an analogy, that the very causality we observe in the human being belongs likewise, in respect of nature itself, to the being that stands wholly apart from nature: for this touches precisely upon that point of heterogeneity which, in the concept of it, is thought between a cause sensibly conditioned as regards its effects and the supersensible original being itself, and which therefore admits of no transfer to the latter. — It is exactly herein — namely, that I am to conceive the divine causality solely on the analogy of an understanding (a power we are acquainted with in no being other than the sensibly conditioned human being) — that there lies the interdict forbidding me to attribute understanding to it in the literal signification³⁶.

3) Opining has no place at all in judgments a priori; rather, through them one either cognizes something as entirely certain, or nothing at all. Yet even granting that the grounds of proof laid down at the outset (here, for instance, the ends in the world) are empirical, one is nonetheless unable, by their means, to form any opinion reaching past the world of sense, or to concede to such rash judgments even the slightest claim to probability. For probability is a part of a certainty possible within a certain series of grounds (the grounds of it being therein compared, as parts to a whole, with what is sufficient), to which that insufficient ground must be capable of being supplemented. But since, as determining grounds for the certainty of one and the same judgment, these grounds have to be of the same kind — for otherwise they would not jointly make up a magnitude, which is what certainty amounts to — it is impossible that some of them should fall inside the limits of a possible experience while others fall beyond every possible experience. And so, given that purely empirical grounds of proof carry us to nothing supersensible, and given that the gap in their series can be filled by nothing whatever: any effort to reach, through them, the supersensible together with a cognition of it makes not the slightest headway, and accordingly a judgment about the latter, resting on considerations borrowed from experience, admits of no probability at all.

4) Whatever is meant to function as hypothesis in explaining how a given appearance is possible must at the very least have its possibility fully assured. It is enough that in the case of a hypothesis I renounce cognition of actuality (which in an opinion put forward as probable is still asserted); more I cannot surrender; the possibility of that which I lay at the foundation of an explanation must at least not be exposed to any doubt, since otherwise empty chimeras of the brain would know no end. Yet to suppose possible a supersensible being fixed according to certain concepts — since for this not one of the conditions required for a cognition, in respect of what within it rests upon intuition, is given, so that there remains, as the criterion of this possibility, nothing but the principle of contradiction (which is able to establish only that the thinking is possible, and not the thought object itself) — would amount to a presupposition utterly without ground.

What follows from this is: that concerning the being of the original being as a deity, or of the soul as a spirit that is immortal, there is, for human reason, absolutely no proof to be had in a theoretical respect that might produce even the smallest measure of holding-to-be-true; and this on a wholly intelligible ground — namely, that for determining the ideas of the supersensible we have no material whatever at hand, since we would be obliged to draw this material from things in the world of sense, though such material is in no way suited to that object, so that, all determination of these ideas being left aside, nothing further remains than the concept of a non-sensible something that is supposed to contain the ultimate ground of the sensible world, a concept that as yet furnishes no cognition (as an enlargement of the concept) of that being's inner constitution.

§ 91. On the kind of holding-to-be-true through a practical faith

If we look solely to the manner in which something can be, for us (in keeping with the subjective make-up of our representational powers), an object of cognition (res cognoscibilis): then the concepts get held up not against the objects, but only against our faculties of cognition and the use these are able to make of a given representation (whether with a theoretical or a practical intent); and the question whether some thing is a cognizable being or not bears not on the possibility of the things themselves, but on our cognition of them.

Cognizable things fall, then, into three sorts: matters of opinion (opinabile), matters of fact (scibile), and matters of faith (mere credibile).

1) Objects of mere rational ideas, incapable of being presented for theoretical cognition in any possible experience whatever, are to that same extent not cognizable things either, so that with respect to them one cannot so much as form an opinion; for opining a priori is of itself already preposterous and the straight road to nothing but chimeras of the brain. Either, then, our a priori proposition holds with certainty, or it carries nothing at all fit to be held true. Matters of opinion, accordingly, are at all times objects of a cognition drawn from experience that is at least possible in itself (objects of the sensible world), yet a cognition which, measured by the sheer degree of this power we actually have, stays for us out of reach. The ether of more recent physicists, for example—an elastic fluid that soaks through every other kind of matter (blending with it most intimately)—counts as a bare matter of opinion, yet remains all the while of such a nature that, had the outer senses been honed to their highest pitch, it might be perceived; and it is nonetheless something no observation or experiment could ever exhibit. To posit rational dwellers on other planets is a matter of opinion; for could we but draw nearer to them, which is in itself possible, we should decide through experience whether or not they exist; but we shall never approach them so closely, and so the matter rests at opining. Yet to opine: that pure spirits, thinking apart from any body, exist within the material universe (dismissing, that is, as one properly should, certain actual appearances put forward to that effect) is to indulge in invention and constitutes no matter of opinion at all, but merely an idea left behind once one strips from a thinking being everything material while still leaving it its thinking. But whether that last (which we are acquainted with in the human being alone, i.e., in union with a body) does then remain behind, we are in no position to decide. A thing of that sort is a ratiocinated being (ens rationis ratiocinantis), not a being of reason (ens rationis ratiocinatae); of the latter it is at any rate feasible to make out, adequately at least for reason's practical employment, the objective reality of its concept, since that employment—furnished with its own proper and apodictically certain principles a priori—goes so far as to require (postulate) it.

2) Objects belonging to concepts whose objective reality admits of proof—be it by pure reason or else by way of experience, and in the first case out of that reason's own theoretical or practical data, though in every case through an intuition answering to them—are (res facti) matters of fact³⁷. Among these belong the mathematical properties of magnitudes (in geometry), inasmuch as they lend themselves to an a priori presentation on behalf of reason's theoretical use. Likewise, things, or characteristics of them, capable of being made out through experience (whether one's own or another's by way of testimony), are equally matters of fact. — What is truly noteworthy, however, is that even a rational idea (one intrinsically incapable of any presentation in intuition, and so of any theoretical proof of its possibility) turns up among the matters of fact; and this is the idea of freedom, the reality of which, as a peculiar species of causality (a concept that, viewed theoretically, would overreach), lets itself be made out through the practical laws of pure reason and, conformably to them, in real deeds, and thus in experience. — Of all the ideas belonging to pure reason, this is the sole one whose object counts as a matter of fact and must be reckoned in among the scibilia.

3) Objects that, in bearing on the dutiful employment of pure practical reason (whether as consequences or as grounds), have to be thought a priori, yet overreach the theoretical employment of that same reason, are nothing but matters of faith. Such is the highest good achievable in the world through freedom, a concept whose objective reality can be proven in no experience open to us, and hence not adequately for reason's theoretical use, but whose application toward the fullest possible realization of that end is all the same enjoined by pure practical reason and must therefore be taken to be possible. This commanded effect—together with the only conditions of its possibility conceivable by us—that is, the existence of God and the soul's immortality, constitute matters of faith (res fidei), and in fact the sole such objects to which the name may be applied³⁸. For even though we must give credence to whatever we can learn only from another's experience through testimony, that does not on its own account make it a matter of faith; since for one among those witnesses it was, in the end, his own experience and matter of fact, or is presupposed to be such. Beyond this, it must be feasible to reach knowledge along this route (that of historical faith); and the objects of history and of geography, like whatever else it is at least possible to know given how our cognitive faculties are constituted, fall not under matters of faith but under matters of fact. Objects of pure reason alone can, if anything, be matters of faith, though not qua objects of merely pure speculative reason; for there they cannot so much as be counted with any certainty among the things—that is, among the objects of the cognition open to us. They are ideas, that is, concepts to which objective reality cannot be secured theoretically. By contrast, the highest final end that we are to realize—that through which alone we can become worthy of being ourselves a creation's final end—is an idea holding objective reality for us in a practical respect, and is a thing; but just because we are unable to secure this reality for the concept in a theoretical intent, it remains a mere matter of faith of pure reason, and yet with it God and immortality figure at once as the conditions under which alone, in keeping with how our (human) reason is constituted, we can think for ourselves the possibility of that effect of the lawful use of our freedom. The holding-to-be-true in matters of faith, however, is a holding-to-be-true from a purely practical intent, i.e., a moral faith, which vouches for nothing on the theoretical side, but solely for the practical, duty-observing cognition of pure reason, and in no wise stretches speculation or those prudential rules of practice framed on the principle of self-love. Should the supreme principle of all moral laws be a postulate, then its highest object's possibility—and therewith likewise the condition under which we can think that possibility—is thereby co-posited as well. By this route the cognition of the latter turns into neither knowledge nor opinion regarding the existence and constitution of these conditions as a theoretical mode of cognition, but merely into an acceptance, within a practical and to that extent enjoined bearing, for the moral use of our reason.

Even could we, upon the ends of nature that physical teleology sets before us in such abundant measure, seemingly rest a determinate concept of an intelligent world-cause, the being of that cause would still be no matter of faith. For since it is posited not with a view to discharging my duty, but merely toward accounting for nature, it would amount to no more than the opinion and hypothesis best suited to our reason. Now that teleology by no means leads on to a determinate concept of God, which is met with, on the contrary, in that of a moral author of the world alone, because he alone furnishes the final end—one to which we may reckon ourselves only insofar as we conduct ourselves in accord with what the moral law lays upon us as a final end and thereby makes binding on us. The concept of God, in consequence, gains the precedence—within our holding-to-be-true—of ranking as a matter of faith solely through its bearing on the object of our duty as the condition for the possibility of reaching that duty's final end; whereas this very concept still cannot press its object as a matter of fact: for, granted that the necessity of duty stands clear enough before practical reason, the reaching of its final end, so far as that does not lie wholly within our command, is assumed only on behalf of the practical use of reason, and thus is not practically necessary in the way that duty itself is³⁹.

Faith (as a habitus, not an actus) is reason's moral cast of thought in holding true what lies beyond the reach of theoretical cognition. It is, accordingly, the mind's steadfast maxim to accept as true—owing to the bindingness that ties one to it—whatever it is necessary to lay down beforehand as a condition of the highest moral final end's possibility⁴⁰; even though neither its possibility nor, just as much, its impossibility can be discerned by us. Faith (so termed without qualification) is a confidence in reaching an aim the furthering of which is a duty, while the possibility of carrying it out is not something we can see into (nor, consequently, that of the sole conditions we are able to think). Faith, then, as directed toward particular objects that are not objects of possible knowing or opining (in which latter case it would have to be styled credulity—chiefly in the historical domain—rather than faith), is thoroughly moral. It is a free holding-to-be-true, not of that for which dogmatic proofs offer themselves to the theoretically determining power of judgment, nor of that to which we deem ourselves bound, but of that which we take up on behalf of an aim under laws of freedom; and yet not in the fashion of some opinion lacking sufficient ground, but as grounded in reason (albeit only as regards its practical use), adequately for the aim thereof: for lacking it the moral cast of thought, upon the affront it meets in theoretical reason's summons to prove (the possibility of morality's object), possesses no firm constancy, but sways to and fro between practical injunctions and theoretical misgivings. To be incredulous is to cleave to the maxim of putting no trust in testimonies at all; unbelieving, by contrast, is he who, since those rational ideas want a theoretical grounding of their reality, denies them on that score every validity. His verdict is thus a dogmatic one. A dogmatic unbelief, however, cannot subsist alongside an ethical maxim that governs one's cast of thought (for reason cannot enjoin the pursuit of an end acknowledged to be sheer chimera); whereas a faith of doubt can indeed subsist, one for which the want of conviction on grounds of speculative reason is a mere hindrance—a hindrance that a critical insight into the bounds of that reason can divest of its sway over conduct, and in whose stead it can set up an overriding practical holding-to-be-true.

When one means to install another principle in the room of certain miscarried attempts in philosophy, and to win it currency, it makes for no small satisfaction to grasp how those attempts, and why they, could not but come to grief.

God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul are the problems toward whose resolution the whole apparatus of metaphysics is directed as toward its final and sole end. Now the belief prevailed that the doctrine of freedom is called for merely as a negative condition of practical philosophy, whereas the doctrine of God and of the soul's make-up, as pertaining to theoretical philosophy, would need to be established on its own and in isolation, so as afterward to couple both with the biddings of the moral law (itself possible only under the condition of freedom) and thereby bring a religion into being. One may soon perceive, however, that these attempts were bound to miscarry. For from bare ontological concepts—whether of things in general or of the existence of a necessary being—there is absolutely no forming a determinate concept of an original being by means of predicates that could be given in experience and would therefore serve cognition; whereas the concept built instead upon experience of nature's physical purposiveness could, for its own part, furnish no proof that, sufficing for morality, would reach to the cognition of a God. No more was knowledge of the soul, gained through experience (which we are able to carry out only during this earthly life), capable of yielding a concept of its spiritual and immortal nature sufficient for morality. Theology and pneumatology, taken as problems on behalf of the sciences of a speculative reason, can be reached through no empirical data or predicates whatever, seeing that their concept overreaches all our faculties of cognition. — The determination of both concepts, of God no less than of the soul (with a view to its immortality), can come about only through predicates which, though themselves possible solely from a supersensible ground, must all the same establish their reality in experience: for by that route alone can they render a cognition of wholly supersensible beings possible. — Of just this kind is the sole concept to be discovered in human reason, the concept of the freedom of the human being under moral laws, together with the final end that freedom, by means of these laws, prescribes—of which the former are suited to invest the author of nature, and the latter the human being, with those properties that carry within them the condition necessary to the possibility of both: so that precisely from this idea one may infer to the existence and constitution of those beings otherwise entirely concealed from us.

Thus the reason why the design of proving God and immortality miscarries along the merely theoretical route lies in this: that of the supersensible, along this route (that of the concepts of nature), no cognition whatever is possible. That it prospers, by contrast, along the moral route (that of the concept of freedom) has this reason: that here the supersensible lying at its base (freedom), by way of a determinate law of causality springing from it, not merely supplies matter for cognizing the other supersensible (the moral final end and the conditions of its practicability), but moreover, as a matter of fact, makes good its reality in deeds—yet for that very reason can supply no ground of proof valid otherwise than for a practical intent (which, too, is the only intent religion stands in need of).

One thing here stays permanently striking: that of the three pure rational ideas—God, freedom, and immortality—freedom alone is that concept of the supersensible which makes good its objective reality (by means of the causality thought within it) in nature, through the effect it can there produce, and precisely thereby renders possible the joining of the other two to nature, and of all three among themselves into a religion; and that we accordingly harbor within us a principle competent to determine the idea of the supersensible in us—and through this the idea of the supersensible outside us as well—toward a cognition, though one possible only for a practical intent, at which merely speculative philosophy (able to yield, even of freedom, no more than a negative concept) was bound to despair: so that the concept of freedom (as the fundamental concept of all unconditionally practical laws) is able to widen reason past those limits within which every concept of nature (a theoretical concept) would have to remain hemmed in without hope.

General remark on teleology

Should the question be raised what rank the moral argument—which proves God's existence merely as a matter of faith for pure practical reason—may claim among the remaining ones within philosophy, then the entire stock of the latter can readily be surveyed, whereupon it emerges that here there is nothing to choose, but rather that philosophy's theoretical faculty must, before an impartial critique, of its own accord relinquish all its claims.

It must, above all, base every holding-true upon a matter of fact, if such holding-true is not to be wholly without ground; and thus the sole difference in proving can lie only in this: whether, upon this fact, one can base a holding-true of the conclusion drawn from it that counts as knowledge within theoretical cognition, or only as faith within practical cognition. All matters of fact belong either to the concept of nature, whose reality is borne out in those objects of sense that are given (or that can be given) prior to all concepts of nature; or to the concept of freedom, whose reality is adequately established by the causality that reason exercises with respect to certain effects it makes possible in the world of sense—effects that it postulates irrefutably in the moral law. The concept of nature (which pertains merely to theoretical cognition) is, then, either metaphysical and wholly a priori; or physical, that is, a posteriori and, of necessity, only thinkable by way of determinate experience. The metaphysical concept of nature (which assumes no determinate experience whatever) is thus an ontological one.

Now the ontological proof of the divine existence, which sets out from an original being's very concept, is either the one that reasons, from ontological predicates—by which alone that being admits of being thought as thoroughgoingly determined—to an absolutely necessary existence, or the one that reasons, from the absolute necessity of the existence of some thing or other, whatever that may be, back to the predicates of the original being: for the concept of an original being requires, if it is not to be derivative, the unconditioned necessity of its existence together with (so that this may be represented) the thoroughgoing determination furnished by the concept of that being. Both requirements were now thought discoverable in the concept attaching to the ontological idea of a most real being of all: and so two metaphysical proofs arose.

The proof that lays a merely metaphysical concept of nature at its foundation (the one strictly termed ontological) reasoned, from the concept of the most real being of all, to its unconditionally necessary existence; for—so the claim goes—were it not to exist, it would be wanting in a reality, namely existence. — The other (also styled the metaphysical-cosmological proof) reasoned, from the necessity that some thing or other exist (which, since an existence is given to me in self-consciousness, must in any case be granted), to the thoroughgoing determination of that same thing as the most real being of all: since everything existent is thoroughgoingly determined, whereas the strictly necessary (that is, what we are to cognize as such, and so a priori) must be thoroughgoingly determined through its concept; a determination, however, that can be encountered only in the concept of a most real thing of all. There is no need here to lay bare the sophistry residing in both inferences, a task already accomplished elsewhere; it suffices to observe that proofs of this kind, however one might sustain them by every sort of dialectical subtlety, could nonetheless never carry beyond the schools into the wider commonwealth, nor exert the least influence upon plain healthy understanding.

The proof that lays at its foundation a concept of nature which can only be empirical, yet which is nevertheless meant to carry beyond nature's limits as the sum of the objects of sense, can be no other than the one derived from the ends of nature: a concept that admits of being given not a priori but only through experience, and yet holds out such a concept of nature's primordial ground as, alone among all we can think, is fitted to the supersensible—namely that of a supreme understanding as the world's cause; which in fact it fully accomplishes according to principles of the reflecting power of judgment, that is, in keeping with how our (human) faculty of cognition is constituted. — But whether, from the very same data, it is able also to supply this concept of a supreme—that is, independent, intelligent—being as that of a God, that is, of the author of a world governed by moral laws, and hence one determined sufficiently for the idea of a final end of the world's existence: that is the question on which everything hinges, whether what we now require is a concept of the original being that is theoretically adequate for the sake of our entire knowledge of nature, or a practical one for religion.

This argument, drawn from physical teleology, is worthy of reverence. It produces the same effect toward conviction on the ordinary understanding as on the most subtle thinker; and a Reimarus, in his still unsurpassed work—wherein he sets out this proof-ground at length, with the thoroughness and clarity that are his own—has thereby won for himself an imperishable merit. — Yet by what means does this proof win so powerful an influence over the mind—especially when it is appraised by cold reason (for the mind's being stirred and uplifted by nature's marvels might be reckoned as mere persuasion)—an influence toward a calm assent that surrenders itself wholly to it? It is not the physical ends—which do, all of them, point toward an unfathomable understanding in the world's cause—that bring this about; for these fall short of it, since they do not satisfy the demand of inquiring reason. For to what purpose (so reason asks) are all those artful natural things; to what purpose the human being himself, with whom, as the last end of nature that we can think, we are obliged to halt; to what purpose does this whole of nature exist, and what is the final end of art so vast and so varied? To be created for enjoyment, or for beholding, contemplating, and admiring (which, if it goes no further, is itself likewise nothing beyond a peculiar sort of enjoyment), as the ultimate final end for whose sake the world and the human being himself exist—with this reason cannot be satisfied: for reason presupposes a personal worth—one the human being alone can confer on himself—as the very condition on which he and his existence can alone be a final end. Lacking this worth (which alone admits of a determinate concept), the ends of nature do not meet his demand, chiefly because they can put into his hands no determinate concept of the supreme being, namely of it as all-sufficient (and precisely thereby unique, properly to be called the highest being), nor of the laws by which its understanding is the world's cause.

That the physical-teleological proof therefore carries conviction, as if it were at once a theological one, does not arise from employing the ideas of nature's ends as just so many empirical proof-grounds for a highest understanding; rather, there insinuates itself unnoticed into the inference that moral proof-ground which resides in every human being and stirs him so inwardly, in virtue of which one also ascribes to the being that manifests itself so inconceivably artfully in the ends of nature a final end, and hence wisdom (though without any entitlement to this from the perception of the former), and so arbitrarily completes that argument in respect of the deficiency still clinging to it. In fact, then, only the moral proof-ground brings about the conviction—and this, too, only in a moral respect, to which everyone feels his assent most inwardly; whereas the physical-teleological one has merely the merit of leading the mind, in its survey of the world, onto the path of ends, and thereby onto an intelligent world-author: whereupon the moral bearing upon ends, and the idea of just such a lawgiver and world-author, taken as a theological concept—though it is a pure addition—nonetheless seems of itself to unfold out of that proof-ground.

On this point one may, in the customary exposition, henceforth also let the matter rest. For it is usually hard for the common and healthy understanding to hold apart as heterogeneous the different principles that it runs together, and from only one of which it actually, and rightly, draws its inference, whenever separating them out calls for much reflection. But the moral proof-ground for God's existence does not, strictly speaking, merely round out the physical-teleological one into a complete proof; it is rather a proof of its own, one that supplies the deficiency in conviction deriving from the latter: since the latter can in truth achieve nothing beyond guiding reason—in its appraisal of nature's ground and of that contingent yet admirable order of nature which we come to know only through experience—toward the causality of a cause that harbors, according to ends, the ground of that order (a cause we are bound, given the constitution of our cognitive faculties, to think as an intelligent one), and beyond making reason attentive to this, and so more receptive to the moral proof. For what that latter concept demands is so essentially different from all that concepts of nature can contain and teach, that a proof-ground and proof of its own, entirely independent of the foregoing, is required in order to state a concept of the original being sufficient for a theology and to conclude to its existence. — The moral proof (which, admittedly, establishes the existence of God only in a practical, yet also indispensable, respect of reason) would accordingly still stand in full force even if we met with no material at all in the world, or only equivocal material, for a physical teleology. It is conceivable that rational beings might find themselves surrounded by a nature of such a sort as displayed no clear trace of organization, but only effects of a bare mechanism of crude matter—on whose account, and given the mutability of certain merely contingently purposive forms and relations, there would appear to be no warrant for concluding to an intelligent author; and where, in that case, there would likewise be no occasion for a physical teleology: and yet reason, receiving here no direction from concepts of nature, would discover, within the concept of freedom and the ethical ideas resting upon it, a practically sufficient ground for postulating the concept of the original being as conformable to this —that is, as a divinity—and for postulating nature (indeed our own existence) as a final end answering to that divinity and its laws, and this precisely with a view to the indispensable command of practical reason. — But that in the actual world there is, for the rational beings within it, ample material for a physical teleology (which would not, strictly, be necessary) affords the moral argument a welcome corroboration, so far as nature is able to exhibit something analogous to the ideas of reason (the moral ones). For the concept of a supreme cause possessed of understanding (which, however, falls far short of sufficing for a theology) thereby gains the reality that suffices for the reflecting power of judgment; yet it is not needed as the basis of the moral proof: nor does the moral proof serve to round out that other one—which, on its own, gives no hint of morality—into one proof by a continued inference under a single principle. Two principles as heterogeneous as nature and freedom can yield but two distinct manners of proof, since the attempt to conduct the latter out of the former proves inadequate for what is to be demonstrated.

Were the physical-teleological proof-ground to suffice for the proof that is sought, this would be highly gratifying to speculative reason; for it would afford hope of producing a theosophy (for that is what one would have to name any theoretical knowledge of the divine nature and of its existence that sufficed both to explain the world's constitution and, at the same time, to determine the moral laws). Similarly, were psychology adequate to attain thereby to a cognition of the soul's immortality, it would render possible a pneumatology equally welcome to speculative reason. Both, however—however gratifying it might be to the presumption of curiosity—fail to fulfill reason's wish with respect to the theory, which would have to rest on knowledge of the nature of things. But whether the former, as theology, and the second, as anthropology—both resting on the ethical, that is, on the principle of freedom, and hence suited to reason's practical use—do not better fulfill their objective final purpose is another question, one we have no need to pursue further here.

The physical-teleological proof-ground, however, does not reach as far as theology, and this for the reason that it neither gives, nor can give, a concept of the original being determinate enough for that purpose; instead one must draw such a concept entirely from elsewhere, or make good its want by way of an arbitrary supplement. From the great purposiveness of natural forms and their interrelations you infer an intelligent world-cause; but of what degree is this understanding? Beyond doubt you cannot presume upon the highest understanding possible; for that would demand your having insight that no understanding greater than the one whose evidences you perceive in the world is so much as thinkable: which would be tantamount to conferring omniscience upon yourselves. In like manner you infer from the world's magnitude a very great power in the author; but you will resign yourselves to acknowledging that this holds significance only comparatively, for your own power of comprehension, and that, since you have no cognition of everything possible that would let you set it beside the world's magnitude so far as you know it, you cannot on so small a scale conclude to any omnipotence of the author, and so on. By this route, then, you arrive at no determinate concept of an original being serviceable for a theology; for such a concept can be met with only in that of the totality of perfections consonant with an understanding, toward which merely empirical data can afford you no help whatever: and lacking such a determinate concept, you cannot conclude to a single intelligent original being either, but can only assume one (to whatever end that may serve). — Now it can, to be sure, be quite readily granted that you (since reason has nothing well-grounded to urge against it) arbitrarily add: where so much perfection is encountered, one may surely assume all perfection to be united in one sole world-cause; because with so determinate a principle reason manages better, in theory as in practice. But you cannot, for all that, tout this concept of the original being as one you have proved, seeing that you have adopted it only for the sake of a better use of reason. All wailing, therefore, or impotent fuming at the supposed sacrilege of doubting the cogency of your chain of inference, is empty bluster, eager to have the doubt one openly declares against your argument taken for a doubting of sacred truth, so that under this cover its own hollowness may be let slip through.

Moral teleology, on the other hand—no less firmly grounded than the physical, and indeed meriting preference precisely because it rests a priori upon principles that cannot be sundered from our reason—conducts us to that which is required for a theology's possibility, namely to a determinate concept of the supreme cause qua world-cause acting by moral laws, and hence of one that satisfies our moral final end: for which nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and so on are required as the natural properties belonging thereto, which have to be conceived as conjoined with, and hence adequate to, the moral final end, itself infinite; and it can in this way, quite by itself alone, furnish the concept of a single world-author serviceable for a theology.

In this way a theology leads also, and directly, to religion, that is, to the cognition of our duties as divine commands: because the cognition of our duty, and of the final end that reason therein imposes on us, was what could first bring forth a determinate concept of God—a concept therefore already, in its very origin, inseparable from an obligation toward this being; whereas, could the concept of the original being also be found determinately along the merely theoretical path (namely, as the mere cause of nature), it would afterward still be attended with great difficulty, perhaps even impossibility, to attribute to this being—without arbitrary interpolation, and by thorough proofs—a causality according to moral laws, apart from which, after all, that ostensibly theological concept can furnish no basis for religion whatever. Were a religion in fact to be founded along this theoretical path, it would, as regards the disposition (wherein, after all, its essential character lies), be really distinct from that one in which the concept of God, and the (practical) conviction of his existence, spring from the foundational ideas of morality. For suppose we had to presuppose the omnipotence, omniscience, and so on of a world-author as concepts handed to us from some other quarter, only afterward to bring our concepts of duty to bear upon our relation to him: then these would necessarily carry with them a very strong colouring of constraint and extorted submission; whereas, when the high regard for the moral law sets before us, entirely freely and by the prescript of our own reason, the final end of our vocation, we then take up into our moral prospects—with the truest reverence, wholly distinct from pathological fear —a cause concordant with that end and with its execution, and submit ourselves to it willingly⁴¹.

If one asks why, after all, it should be of any concern to us to have a theology at all, it becomes plainly evident that it is needed not for extending or rectifying our knowledge of nature, nor indeed any theory whatever, but solely for religion—that is, for the practical, and namely the moral, use of reason—and this in a subjective respect. Should it now turn out that the sole argument leading to a determinate concept of theology's object is itself a moral one, then this will not only occasion no surprise, but one will also, as regards the accessibility of holding-true on the strength of this proof-ground, find nothing lacking with respect to its final purpose, once it is admitted that such an argument establishes God's existence as sufficient only for our moral vocation—that is, in a practical respect—and that speculation therein by no means demonstrates its strength, or thereby enlarges the compass of its territory. The surprise, too, or the alleged conflict of a possibility of theology here maintained with what the critique of speculative reason said of the categories—namely, that these can yield cognition only in their application to objects of sense, but in no way when applied to the supersensible—will vanish once one sees them here put to use for a cognition of God, yet not in a theoretical respect (according to what his nature, unsearchable by us, may be in itself), but solely in a practical one. — In order, on this occasion, to make an end of the misconstrual of that most necessary teaching of the critique—a teaching that, to the vexation of the blind dogmatist, refers reason back within its bounds—I here append the following clarification of it.

When I attribute to a body a moving force, and so think it by way of the category of causality, then thereby I cognize it at the same time; that is, I determine the concept of it as an object in general through that which pertains to it, taken as an object of sense in its own right (this being what makes that relation possible). For if the moving force I attribute to it is a repulsive one, then there accrues to it (even before I place beside it another body against which it exerts that force) a location in space, further an extension—that is, space within itself—and moreover the filling of that space by the repulsive forces of its parts, and finally too the law of this filling (namely that, as the body's extension grows and the space it occupies with those same parts by means of this force increases, the basis of the parts' repulsion must diminish in like proportion). — If, on the contrary, I conceive a supersensible being as the first mover, hence by way of the category of causality with respect to that same world-determination (the movement of matter): then I must place it in no location in space whatever, no more count it as extended—indeed, I am not even permitted to conceive it as existing in time, coexisting with other things. Thus I possess no determinations at all that could render intelligible to me how the motion, having this being for its ground, is so much as possible. Consequently, through the predicate of cause (as first mover) I do not, taken by itself, cognize this being in the slightest: rather I possess only the representation of a something that holds the ground of the world's motions; and its relation to those motions, as their cause—since it otherwise hands me nothing belonging to the makeup of the thing that is the cause—leaves my concept of the latter wholly empty. The reason for this is that, with predicates which find their object solely within the sensible world, I am able indeed to advance to the existence of a something that must hold the ground of that world, but never to fixing what its concept as a supersensible being would be—a concept that expels every one of those predicates. So through the category of causality, when I fix it by the notion of a first mover, I gain no cognition whatever of what God is; but perhaps I shall fare better if, taking my cue from the world's order, I undertake not merely to think his causality as that of a supreme understanding, but also to cognize him through this determination of the said concept: since there the burdensome requirement of space and of extension drops away. — To be sure, the great purposiveness present in the world does force us to think for it a supreme cause, and to conceive its causality as exercised through an understanding; yet this in no way entitles us to attribute the same to it (as, for instance, to think God's eternity as existence throughout all time, since otherwise we can frame no concept whatever of mere existence as a magnitude, that is, as duration; or to think the divine omnipresence as existence in every place, so as to render the immediate presence to things external to one another graspable by us—without, however, being permitted to attribute any one of these determinations to God as something cognized in him). When I fix the causality of the human being with respect to certain products, explicable only through deliberate purposiveness, by conceiving it as an understanding belonging to him: then I need not stop short there, but may attribute this predicate to him as a well-known property of his, and thereby cognize him. For I am aware that intuitions present themselves to the human being's senses and are, by the understanding, brought under a concept and therewith under a rule; that this concept holds only the common mark (letting the particular fall away) and is thus discursive; that the rules under which given representations get subsumed within a consciousness in general are furnished by it even ahead of those intuitions, and so on: this property, then, I attribute to the human being as one whereby I cognize him. Now if I wish to think a supersensible being (God) as intelligence, this is, in a certain regard of my use of reason, not merely permitted but also unavoidable; but to flatter oneself that one may attribute understanding to it and, thereby, be able to cognize it as by a property of its own is by no means permitted: because I should then be forced to drop every one of those conditions under which alone an understanding is known to me, so that the predicate serving only for the determination of the human being cannot be referred to a supersensible object at all, and thus, by a causality so determined, what God is cannot be cognized in the slightest. And it stands the same way with all the categories, which can bear no meaning for cognition in the theoretical respect unless they are brought to bear on objects of possible experience. — But on the analogy with an understanding I can—indeed I must—in a certain other respect think a supersensible being for myself, without on that account meaning to cognize it theoretically; namely when this determining of its causality bears on an effect in the world that involves a purpose morally necessary yet unachievable by beings of sense: for in that case a cognition of God and of his existence (theology) becomes possible through properties and determinations of his causality thought in him merely on the analogy, which, in a practical bearing—but also only with regard to this (as moral)—possesses all the reality required. — An ethico-theology is thus indeed possible; for morality can, with its rule, get on without theology, but not with the final purpose that this very rule imposes—not, that is, without leaving reason destitute as regards that purpose. But a theological ethics (of pure reason) is impossible: because laws that reason does not, from the outset, give of itself, and whose observance it does not, as a pure practical faculty, also effect, cannot be moral. In the same way a theological physics would be an absurdity, since it would propound not laws of nature but ordinances of a supreme will; whereas a physical (properly, physical-teleological) theology can at least serve as a propaedeutic to theology proper: inasmuch as, by way of contemplating the natural ends of which it offers rich material, it gives occasion for the idea of a final end that nature cannot set up; and hence, while it can indeed make felt the need for a theology that would fix the concept of God with enough determinacy for reason's highest practical employment, it cannot itself bring that theology forth, nor ground it adequately upon its evidences.