I. On the division of philosophy

Whenever philosophy—so far as it holds within itself, by means of concepts, principles for the rational cognition of things (and not, as logic does, merely the principles governing the form of thought as such, with no distinction drawn among objects)—is partitioned in the usual manner into a theoretical and a practical part: one is doing entirely the right thing. But then the concepts too, which assign their object to the principles of this rational cognition, must be specifically distinct, since otherwise they would authorize no division—and a division at all times presupposes a contrast between the principles of that rational cognition which belongs to the several parts of a science.

Yet only two sorts of concept exist, ones that permit exactly as many differing principles for how their objects are possible: namely, the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom. Because the first of these make a theoretical cognition possible in accordance with principles a priori, while the second—as regards those same principles—carries with it already in its very concept only a negative principle (that of sheer opposition), yet erects, for the determining of the will, expanding fundamental propositions that are for this reason called practical: philosophy comes to be rightly divided, in keeping with its principles, into two wholly distinct parts—the theoretical as philosophy of nature, the practical as moral philosophy (for such is the term applied to reason's practical legislation under the concept of freedom). Up to now, however, a great abuse of these expressions—for dividing the various principles, and along with them philosophy itself—has held sway: in that one identified the practical that rests on concepts of nature with the practical that rests on the concept of freedom, and in this way made, under the very same names of a theoretical and a practical philosophy, a division through which (since both parts could share identical principles) nothing was in fact divided at all.

For the will, as a faculty of desire, is one among the many natural causes in the world—namely the one that operates in accordance with concepts; and everything represented as possible (or as necessary) by means of a will counts as practically possible (or necessary): in contrast to the physical possibility or necessity of an effect whose cause is determined to its causality not by concepts (but rather, as with lifeless matter through mechanism and with animals through instinct). — Here, now, it is left undetermined, as regards the practical, whether the concept that prescribes the rule for the will's causality is one of nature or one of freedom.

This latter distinction, however, is essential. For should the concept that settles the causality be one of nature, the principles will be technically practical; should it, however, be one of freedom, they will be morally practical: and because, in classifying a rational science, all turns upon that particular difference among objects whose cognition stands in need of differing principles, the first kind will belong to theoretical philosophy (as the doctrine of nature), while the others, wholly on their own, will make up the second part, that is (as the doctrine of morals) practical philosophy.

All technically practical rules (that is, those of art and skill in general, or likewise of prudence, as a skill in bringing influence to bear on human beings and their will), insofar as their principles rest upon concepts, must be reckoned merely as corollaries appended to theoretical philosophy. For what they concern is merely the possibility of things under concepts of nature, to which there belong not only the means to be met with in nature for the purpose, but the will itself as well (being a faculty of desire, and hence a power of nature), insofar as it can be determined, in conformity with those rules , by the incentives of nature. Yet practical rules of this kind are not termed laws (in the way physical ones are, say), but only precepts: and precisely for this reason, that the will stands not merely under the concept of nature, but likewise under the concept of freedom, with respect to which the will's own principles bear the name of laws and, taken together with what follows from them, alone make up the second part of philosophy, namely the practical one.

Thus, just as little as the resolution of problems in pure geometry belongs to a special part of that science, or as the art of land-surveying earns the title of a practical geometry—as opposed to the pure—being a second part of geometry as such: so too, and still less, may the mechanical or chemical art of experiments or of observations pass for a practical part of the doctrine of nature; nor, finally, may domestic, agricultural, and civic economy, the art of social dealings, the rules of dietetics, not even the general doctrine of happiness, indeed not so much as the curbing of the inclinations and the bridling of the affects on behalf of that doctrine, be reckoned to practical philosophy, nor may these last perhaps even constitute the second part of philosophy as a whole; for the reason that one and all they hold nothing but rules of skill—which are on that account only technically practical—serving to produce an effect that is possible under concepts of nature governing cause and effect, and these, inasmuch as they fall within theoretical philosophy, stand subject to those precepts as mere corollaries drawn out of it (out of natural science) and can accordingly demand no place in a separate philosophy, the one termed practical. By contrast, the morally practical precepts—which are founded wholly upon the concept of freedom, to the utter exclusion of any determining grounds of the will taken from nature—make up a quite distinctive species of precept: precepts which, just like the rules that nature obeys, are called laws without qualification, yet which rest not, as those do, on sensible conditions, but on a supersensible principle, and which, beside the theoretical part of philosophy, claim entirely for themselves a further part under the title of practical philosophy.

From this one perceives that a body of practical precepts which philosophy furnishes does not, on the ground that they are practical, make up a special part of it placed at the side of the theoretical part; for they could well be that even if their principles were drawn entirely out of nature's theoretical cognition (as technically practical rules); rather, it does so because and when their principle is in no way borrowed from the concept of nature, which is invariably conditioned by the senses, and rests therefore on the supersensible, which the concept of freedom alone renders knowable through formal laws, and they are on that account morally practical—that is, not merely precepts and rules directed to this or that intention, but laws that hold without any antecedent reference to ends and intentions.

II. On the domain of philosophy in general

As far as concepts a priori have their application, just so far does the use of our faculty of cognition according to principles extend, and with it philosophy.

The whole aggregate of objects, however, upon which those concepts are brought to bear, so as if possible to yield a cognition of them, can be divided in keeping with the differing sufficiency or insufficiency of our faculties for this purpose.

Concepts, to the extent that they are related to objects—regardless of whether any cognition of these is attainable or not—possess their field, one fixed solely through the relation in which their object stands to our faculty of cognition generally. — That portion of this field in which cognition is possible for us constitutes a ground (territorium) for these concepts and for the faculty of cognition they require. That stretch of the ground over which these exercise legislation is the domain (ditio) belonging to these concepts and to the faculties of cognition that are theirs by right. Empirical concepts thus have their ground, to be sure, in nature as the totality of all objects of the senses, but no domain (only their place of residence, domicilium): for although they are produced in a lawful manner, they are not legislative, but rather the rules grounded upon them are empirical and therefore contingent.

Our whole faculty of cognition possesses two domains—the one belonging to the concepts of nature, the other to the concept of freedom—for through both alike it legislates a priori. Accordingly, philosophy too now divides into the theoretical and the practical. But the ground on which its domain is erected and its legislation exercised is always still only the totality of the objects of all possible experience, insofar as they count as nothing more than mere appearances; for without this no legislation of the understanding with respect to them could be conceived.

Legislation by means of concepts of nature is effected by the understanding and is theoretical. Legislation by means of the concept of freedom is effected by reason and is merely practical. In the practical sphere alone can reason be legislative; as regards theoretical cognition (of nature) it is able merely (being acquainted with the law by way of the understanding) to derive inferences from given laws through syllogisms, inferences that in the end always stop short at nature. In the reverse case, however, where rules are of a practical kind, reason does not for that reason become at once legislative, seeing that they can likewise be technically-practical.

Understanding and reason accordingly exercise two different legislations on a single and self-same ground of experience, yet without either being allowed to do the other any prejudice. For just as the concept of nature exerts no influence on the legislation carried out through the concept of freedom, so too does the latter in no way trouble nature's legislation. — That one can at the very least think, without falling into contradiction, the joint subsistence of both legislations, along with the faculties that pertain to them, within a single subject—this was established by the Critique of Pure Reason, which demolished the objections brought against it by exposing the dialectical semblance harbored in them.

But the reason why these two different domains—which, while not in their legislation, do nevertheless in their effects within the sensible world continually restrict one another—do not amount to One lies in this: that the concept of nature, though it presents its objects in intuition, offers them not as things in themselves but as mere appearances, while the concept of freedom, for its part, presents within its object something that is a thing in itself, though never within intuition, and thus neither of them is able to supply any theoretical cognition of its object (and indeed of the thinking subject itself) as things in themselves—which would be the supersensible, an idea that one must, to be sure, lay beneath the possibility of all those objects of experience , though one can never elevate or broaden it into a cognition.

Hence there exists, for our entire faculty of cognition, an unbounded yet likewise inaccessible field—that of the supersensible—wherein we come upon no ground of our own, so that upon it we can possess no domain for theoretical cognition, be it for the understanding's concepts or for reason's; a field that we are indeed obliged to fill with ideas on behalf of reason's theoretical as well as practical use, though to these ideas, with respect to the laws arising from the concept of freedom, we can impart no reality save a practical one, so that our theoretical cognition is thereby not enlarged in the slightest toward the supersensible.

Now although a chasm beyond all survey stands fixed, sundering the concept of nature's domain, as the sensible, from that of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible, such that no crossing from the one to the other (that is, by way of reason's theoretical employment) is possible—as though they amounted to a plurality of distinct worlds, of which the first can exert no influence upon the second: the latter is nonetheless meant to bear an influence upon the former, that is, the concept of freedom is to render actual within the sensible world the end laid down by its laws; and nature must therefore admit of being conceived in such a manner that the conformity to law of its form accords, at the very least, with the possibility of those ends which are to be brought about in it according to laws of freedom. — There must, then, after all exist some ground for the unity of the supersensible that lies at the basis of nature with what the concept of freedom practically comprises within it—a ground the concept of which, although it attains a cognition of that ground neither theoretically nor practically, and consequently possesses no proper domain of its own, still renders possible the passage from a way of thinking that proceeds according to the principles of the one to a way of thinking according to the principles of the other.

III. On the critique of the power of judgment, as a means of connecting philosophy's two parts into one whole

The critique of the faculties of cognition, in view of what they are able to achieve a priori, possesses in truth no domain with respect to objects: for it is no doctrine, but has only to examine whether, and how, given the constitution of our faculties, a doctrine is possible through them. Its field extends to all the pretensions of those faculties, so as to confine them within the bounds of their legitimacy. But something that cannot enter into the division of philosophy may nonetheless enter, as a principal part, the critique of the pure faculty of cognition taken generally, provided, that is, that it holds principles which, on their own, serve neither a theoretical nor a practical use.

The concepts of nature, which hold within themselves the a priori ground for all theoretical cognition, had their basis in the legislation of the understanding. — The concept of freedom, for its part, which enclosed the ground of all sensibly-unconditioned practical precepts a priori, took its basis from reason's own legislation. Both faculties, accordingly, quite apart from the fact that in their logical form they admit of application to principles of whatever origin, each possess in addition a legislation peculiarly their own with respect to content—one above which none other (a priori) stands, and which for that reason vindicates philosophy's partition into a theoretical and a practical branch.

But within the family that gathers the higher faculties of cognition there still stands, after all, an intermediate member between the understanding and reason. This middle member is the power of judgment, of which one has grounds, reasoning by analogy, to conjecture that it too—though not indeed a legislation of its own—may yet harbor within itself, a priori, a principle proper to it for the seeking of laws, at most a merely subjective one: a principle which, even if no field of objects were to fall to it as its domain, can nonetheless possess some ground or other, together with a certain constitution of that ground, for which precisely this principle, and it alone, might hold valid.

But here (again to judge by analogy) a fresh ground arises for linking the power of judgment to another order among our powers of representation—an order that appears more important still than the kinship it holds with the family of the faculties of cognition. For every power or capacity of the soul may be led back to those three which permit of no further derivation from any ground held in common: the faculty of cognition, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, as well as the faculty of desire¹. As regards the faculty of cognition, the understanding by itself does the legislating, whenever that faculty—as must in fact occur when one takes it on its own, unmixed with the faculty of desire—is brought to bear on nature as the faculty of a theoretical cognition, nature being the one thing in regard to which (as appearance) we are able to prescribe laws by means of concepts of nature a priori, concepts that are strictly speaking pure concepts of the understanding. — When it comes to the faculty of desire, regarded as a higher faculty that follows the concept of freedom, it is reason alone—the sole seat of that concept—that legislates a priori. — Now the feeling of pleasure lies between the faculty of cognition and the faculty of desire, precisely as the power of judgment lies between the understanding and reason. Hence one may at least provisionally conjecture that the power of judgment, too, holds within itself a principle a priori, and that—since pleasure or displeasure attaches necessarily to the faculty of desire (be it that, as with the lower faculty, it runs ahead of that faculty's principle, or that, as with the higher one, it issues solely from that faculty's being determined through the moral law)—it will in like manner bring about a transition out of the pure faculty of cognition—that is, out of the domain of the concepts of nature—across into the domain of the concept of freedom, much as, in its logical employment, it renders the passage from the understanding over to reason possible.

And so, although philosophy admits of division into no more than two principal parts, the theoretical and the practical; although everything we might wish to say concerning the power of judgment's own principles would have to be reckoned, within that division, under the theoretical part, that is, under rational cognition governed by concepts of nature: the critique of pure reason, which must establish all of this beforehand, ahead of any attempt at that system and for the sake of its very possibility, is nonetheless made up of three parts—a critique of the pure understanding, a critique of the pure power of judgment, and a critique of the pure reason—these faculties being termed pure precisely because their legislation is a priori.

IV. On the power of judgment as a faculty that legislates a priori

The power of judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as falling under a universal. When a universal is given (a rule, a principle, a law), the power of judgment that subsumes the particular beneath it (even where, as transcendental power of judgment, it states a priori the conditions under which alone subsumption under that universal can occur) is determining. But where only the particular is given, for which it is to find the universal, the power of judgment is merely reflecting.

The determining power of judgment, working under the universal transcendental laws that the understanding furnishes, does no more than subsume; its law is marked out for it a priori, so that it need not think up any law of its own in order to bring the particular in nature under the universal. — Yet nature exhibits such a diversity of forms — so many modifications, as it were, of the universal transcendental concepts of nature, forms left undetermined by the laws that the pure understanding provides a priori (since those laws touch only the possibility of a nature as such, as an object of the senses) — that there must nonetheless be laws for these forms as well; laws that, being empirical, may well strike our understanding as contingent, yet which, if they are to count as laws (as indeed the very concept of a nature demands), must all the same be taken as necessary on the strength of some principle that unifies the manifold, even if that principle remains unknown to us. — The reflecting power of judgment, whose charge it is to rise from what is particular in nature to what is universal, accordingly requires a principle that no experience can furnish, since its very office is to ground the unity of all empirical principles under principles that are themselves empirical but higher, and hence to ground the possibility of ordering them systematically one beneath another. Such a transcendental principle, then, the reflecting power of judgment can only prescribe to itself; it may not draw it from any other source (for it would otherwise be a determining power of judgment), nor may it dictate such a principle to nature; for reflection upon nature's laws is directed by nature, while nature is not directed by the conditions under which we labor to form a concept of it — a concept that, measured against those conditions, is wholly contingent.

Now this principle can be none other than this: since the universal laws of nature are grounded in our own understanding, which lays them down for nature (albeit only in accordance with the general concept of nature as such), the particular empirical laws must — with respect to whatever those universal laws leave undetermined in them — be regarded under a unity such as they would possess if some understanding (though not our own) had furnished them for the sake of our own faculties of cognition, in order to render possible a system of experience governed by particular laws of nature. Not that on this basis such an understanding must actually be presupposed (for it is solely the reflecting power of judgment for which this idea functions as a principle — a principle for reflection, not for determination); rather, by this means the faculty prescribes a law to itself alone, and not to nature.

Now since the concept of an object, so far as it likewise carries within it the ground of that object's reality, bears the name of the end, and since the agreement of a thing with that make-up of things which is possible only through ends is called the purposiveness of its form: the principle governing the power of judgment, as concerns the form that natural things take under empirical laws at large, consists in the purposiveness of nature across its manifold variety. That is, through this very concept nature comes to be represented just as though some understanding had held within it the ground on which the manifold of nature's empirical laws achieves its unity.

Nature's purposiveness is thus a special concept a priori whose sole origin lies in the reflecting power of judgment. For one cannot impute anything of this kind — a relating of nature within its products to ends — to the products of nature themselves; one can only put the concept to use in reflecting upon them with a view to the linkage of appearances in nature that is given under empirical laws. This concept, moreover, is wholly distinct from that of practical purposiveness (in human art, or indeed in morals), notwithstanding that it is conceived on an analogy with it.

V. The principle of nature's formal purposiveness is a transcendental principle of the power of judgment

We call a principle transcendental when it represents that universal condition, holding a priori, apart from which nothing whatever could come to be an object of our cognition. A principle counts as metaphysical, on the other hand, when the a priori condition it sets out is one under which objects — objects whose very concept has to be supplied by experience — admit of still further a priori determination. Take, for example, the principle by which we cognize bodies as substances, and indeed as substances subject to alteration: it is transcendental insofar as it states that any alteration of theirs must have some cause; it turns metaphysical, however, once it states that such alteration requires an external cause — the reason being that, in the one case, the body need only be conceived through ontological predicates (that is, pure concepts of the understanding), say as a substance, if the proposition is to be cognized a priori, whereas in the other the empirical concept of a body (namely, of a thing movable in space) has to be laid under the proposition, though even then it can be grasped wholly a priori that this latter predicate — motion arising solely from an outer cause — pertains to the body. — And the principle of nature's purposiveness (amid the multiplicity of its empirical laws) is, as I shall show in a moment, transcendental in just this way. For once objects are thought of as falling under this principle, the concept of them is nothing more than the pure concept of things that can be objects of experiential cognition at all, a concept holding nothing empirical within it. The principle of a practical purposiveness stands in contrast here: since it has to be conceived by way of the idea whereby a free will receives its determination, it would be a metaphysical principle — for the concept of a faculty of desire, viewed as a will, is bound after all to be given empirically (and thus falls outside the transcendental predicates). Yet neither principle is on that account empirical; both are principles a priori — for joining the predicate to the empirical concept that serves as the subject of their respective judgments calls for no additional experience, that linkage being discernible entirely a priori.

One can see well enough that a concept of nature's purposiveness ranks among the transcendental principles by looking to the maxims of the power of judgment — maxims placed a priori beneath our inquiry into nature, which nonetheless aim at nothing beyond the possibility of experience, and so of cognizing nature, yet nature not merely at large but as fixed through a multiplicity of particular laws. — As pronouncements of a metaphysical wisdom, they surface often enough in the course of this science, though only here and there, prompted by various rules whose necessity no derivation from concepts can exhibit. »Nature chooses the shortest route (lex parsimoniae); all the same it takes no leap, neither across the succession of its changes nor in setting side by side forms that differ in kind (lex continui in natura); and for all the vast variety of its empirical laws, it still forms a unity resting on but few principles (principia praeter necessitatem non sunt multiplicanda)«; and so on.

Should one nevertheless set out to pin down where these principles originate, and try to do so along psychological lines, that undertaking runs flatly against everything they mean. For they do not report what in fact takes place — that is, the rule by which our powers of cognition really conduct their play, and how judging actually proceeds — but lay down how one is meant to judge; and were the principles no more than empirical, this logical, objective necessity would never come to light. Nature's purposiveness for our cognitive powers and their employment — a purposiveness that plainly shines forth from them — is therefore a transcendental principle of judgments, and as such it calls for a transcendental deduction too, one whereby the ground for judging in this fashion has to be traced back a priori to the wellsprings of cognition.

Among the grounds that make an experience possible we do, admittedly, meet with something necessary at the outset — namely those universal laws in whose absence nature at all (as an object of the senses) could not so much as be thought; and these laws rest upon the categories, brought to bear on the formal conditions of every intuition available to us, insofar as that intuition too is furnished a priori. Beneath these laws the power of judgment operates determinatively, for its whole task is simply to bring particular cases under laws already given. For example, the understanding declares that every alteration has its cause (a universal law of nature), and the transcendental power of judgment need then do no more than state a priori the condition under which something may be subsumed beneath the concept the understanding has put forward — that condition being the succession of the determinations of one and the very same thing. For nature taken quite generally, then (as a possible object of experience), that law stands cognized as unconditionally necessary. — But over and above that formal condition of time, the objects of empirical cognition are further determined in numerous respects, or at least determinable so far as a priori judgment reaches, so that natures differing in kind, beyond whatever they share as belonging to nature at large, may act as causes in endlessly varied ways; and each such kind, given the concept of a cause as such, has to possess its own rule, which is a law and therefore brings necessity with it — even if, owing to how our cognitive faculties are constituted and bounded, we gain no insight whatever into that necessity. So within nature, as regards its merely empirical laws, we are obliged to conceive the possibility of an infinite variety of empirical laws that remain, for our insight, contingent all the same (incapable of being cognized a priori); and with these in view we appraise nature's unity under empirical laws — together with the very possibility that experience should form a unity (a system governed by empirical laws) — as something contingent. But since a unity of that sort must nonetheless be presupposed and taken for granted as necessary — for otherwise no continuous linkage of empirical cognitions into one whole of experience could arise, seeing that the universal laws of nature do supply such a linkage among things according to their genus, as natural things generally, yet not according to their species, as the particular natural beings they are — the power of judgment is compelled, for its own use, to lay down as an a priori principle that what for human insight is contingent in the particular (empirical) laws of nature does nonetheless harbor a lawful unity — one we cannot fathom, and yet one that can be thought — in the way their manifold is bound together into an experience possible in itself. It follows that, because this lawful unity — belonging to a combination that we recognize as answering, to be sure, to a necessary aim (a requirement of the understanding), while all the while intrinsically contingent — comes to be represented as a purposiveness of the objects (here, of nature) , the power of judgment, being merely reflective with respect to things that fall under possible empirical laws still awaiting discovery, has to think nature, as regards those latter laws, under a principle of purposiveness answering to our faculty of cognition — the very principle voiced in the maxims of the power of judgment set out above. Now this transcendental concept of a purposiveness in nature is neither a concept drawn from nature nor one drawn from freedom, since it attributes nothing at all to the object (to nature); it sets forth only the single manner in which, when we reflect on natural objects with an eye to a thoroughly coherent experience, we are bound to proceed — and so it is a subjective principle (a maxim) of the power of judgment; which is why we too feel gladdened, as though by a fortunate accident that has smiled on our aim (relieved, strictly speaking, of a need), whenever we light upon such a systematic unity among laws that are merely empirical — even though we had of necessity to presuppose that such a unity obtains, without our being in a position either to see into it or to demonstrate it.

To satisfy oneself that this deduction of the concept at hand is sound, and that it must be adopted as a transcendental principle of cognition, one has only to weigh how large the task is: to fashion, out of perceptions given to us, a connected experience of a nature that may well hold an unlimited variety of empirical laws — a task lodged a priori in our understanding. True, the understanding possesses a priori the general laws of nature, and without them nature could be no object of experience at all; yet beyond these it stands in need, besides, of a certain orderliness in nature's more particular rules — rules that can reach it only by way of experience and that, from its own standpoint, are contingent. These rules — barring which there would be no passage at all from the broad analogy of a possible experience as such to the particular case — it must represent to itself as laws (that is, as necessary), since otherwise they would compose no order of nature, even though it neither cognizes their necessity nor could ever come to see it. Hence, although it can settle nothing a priori regarding these (objects), still, in order to trace out these so-called empirical laws, it must set beneath all reflection upon nature an a priori principle — that a cognizable order of nature is possible in keeping with them — a principle that the following propositions put into words: that nature contains a subordination of genera and species graspable by us; that the genera in turn draw near one another under some shared principle, allowing a passage from one to the next, and thereby up to a higher genus; that, although our understanding is struck at first by the seeming inevitability of having to assume just as many distinct kinds of causality as there are specific differences among natural effects, these may nonetheless fall under some modest number of principles, whose discovery is to be our concern, and so forth. This concord between nature and our faculty of cognition is what the power of judgment presupposes a priori for the sake of reflecting on nature by its empirical laws, whereas the understanding grants the same concord to be objectively contingent, and it is the power of judgment alone that credits it to nature as a transcendental purposiveness (bearing on the subject's faculty of cognition) — for without presupposing it we should have no order of nature under empirical laws, and hence no clue to guide the experience and inquiry we mean to conduct with those laws across the whole of their variety.

For it is entirely thinkable that, for all the uniformity that natural things display under the universal laws — the laws apart from which the very form of experiential cognition could gain no foothold whatever — the specific diversity of nature's empirical laws, along with their effects, might yet run so deep that our understanding would find it impossible to detect any graspable order there, to sort nature's products into genera and species, and so to apply the principles by which the one is explained and understood to the explaining and grasping of another, and to build a connected experience out of a stuff so bewildering to us (in truth merely infinite in its variety and out of scale with our power of comprehension).

The power of judgment thus carries within itself an a priori principle for nature's possibility as well, though only in a subjective regard — a principle by which it prescribes a law not to nature (which would be autonomy) but to its own self (which is heautonomy) for the purpose of reflecting on nature; and this law one might name the law of the specification of nature with respect to its empirical laws — a law it does not read off nature a priori, but adopts on behalf of an order of nature that our understanding can cognize, an order lying in the division it draws among nature's universal laws when it wishes to rank a manifold of particular laws beneath them. So when one says that nature specifies its universal laws according to the principle of purposiveness for our faculty of cognition — that is, so as to suit the human understanding in its necessary business of locating, for the particular that perception offers it, the universal, and of finding, for what is diverse (though universal within each species), a connection once more in the unity of the principle — one is thereby neither dictating a law to nature nor gleaning one from it through observation (however much observation may confirm that principle). For the principle in play is not one belonging to the determining power of judgment but solely to the reflecting power of judgment; all that is intended is this: that, however nature may turn out to be arranged under its universal laws, one is bound at every turn to hunt down its empirical laws by that principle and the maxims resting upon it, since only just so far as it holds can we advance, in experience, in the exercise of our understanding and win any cognition.

VI. On the connection of the feeling of pleasure with the concept of nature's purposiveness

The agreement of nature we have in mind, in the manifold of its particular laws, with our need to discover a generality of principles for them, must, so far as any of our insight reaches, be judged contingent, and yet at the same time indispensable for the requirement of our understanding, and hence a purposiveness through which nature accords with our aim, though an aim bent solely on cognition. — Those universal laws of the understanding that are simultaneously laws of nature belong to it every bit as necessarily (even though they arise from spontaneity) as do the laws governing the motion of matter; and their generation presupposes no design upon our cognitive faculties, since it is only by their means that we first arrive at any concept of what it is to have cognition of things (of nature), and since they attach to nature necessarily as the object of our cognition in general. That nature's order under its particular laws should nonetheless be truly commensurate to that capacity — in spite of a manifoldness and heterogeneity that at least possibly outstrips our power to take it in — is, as far as we can discern, contingent; and the tracing of that order is a task of the understanding, undertaken with a view to a necessary end of its own, namely to instill unity of principles into nature: an end that the power of judgment must then impute to nature, since the understanding can lay down no law to it in this regard.

The attainment of any aim is tied to the feeling of pleasure; and where what conditions the former is an a priori representation — as with the present principle for the reflecting power of judgment in general — the feeling of pleasure, too, stands determined on an a priori ground and as valid for everyone: and indeed purely through the object's relation to the faculty of cognition, without the concept of purposiveness here paying the least regard to the faculty of desire, so that it thereby marks itself off wholly from every practical purposiveness of nature.

Indeed, since in the coincidence of perceptions with the laws that flow from universal concepts of nature (the categories) we find not the least effect on the feeling of pleasure in us, and cannot find any, because in this the understanding operates unintentionally and by the necessity of its own nature: so, on the other side, the discovered concurrence of two or more heterogeneous empirical laws of nature under one principle that comprehends them both is the source of a quite palpable pleasure, and often even of wonder, indeed of a wonder that does not cease though one already knows its object well enough. To be sure, in the graspability of nature, as well as in the unity of its partition into genera and species — through which alone empirical concepts become possible, and by which we cognize nature under its particular laws — we sense no marked pleasure any longer: yet it was assuredly present in its day, and only because the most ordinary experience would be impossible without it has it little by little fused with bare cognition and dropped out of special notice. — Something is accordingly called for that, in the judging of nature, alerts us to its purposiveness for our understanding — an effort to bring its dissimilar laws, wherever possible, under higher though still empirical ones — so as, when it succeeds, to take pleasure in this attunement of them to our faculty of cognition, an attunement we look upon as merely contingent. A representation of nature, on the contrary, would be thoroughly repugnant to us were it to announce in advance that, on the slightest probing past the most ordinary experience, we would run into a heterogeneity of its laws such as to render the unification of its particular laws under universal empirical ones impossible for our understanding: for this runs counter to the principle governing the subjectively purposive specification of nature into its genera, and counter to our reflecting power of judgment with respect to the aim of the latter.

This assumption on the part of the power of judgment nonetheless remains so undetermined regarding how far that ideal purposiveness of nature is to be stretched for our faculty of cognition, that, should we be told that a deeper or wider acquaintance with nature through observation must in the end run up against a multiplicity of laws which no human understanding can reduce to a single principle, we rest content with that too, though we would sooner hear it when others hold out to us the hope: that the more inwardly we came to know nature, or the more we could set it beside outer members for now unknown to us, the more simply, in its principles, and the more in unison, beneath the seeming heterogeneity of its empirical laws, we should find it, the farther our experience were to advance. For our power of judgment bids us operate on the principle of nature's adequacy to our faculty of cognition, as far as that extends, without settling — since it is no determining power of judgment that furnishes us this rule — whether somewhere it meets its limits or not: because, though with respect to the rational employment of our cognitive faculties we can indeed set limits, in the empirical field no fixing of limits is possible.

VII. On the aesthetic representation of the purposiveness of nature

In the representation of an object, that which is merely subjective — that is, which makes up its bearing on the subject and not on the thing — constitutes the representation's aesthetic character; but that in it which serves, or admits of being used, toward determining the object (toward cognition) constitutes its logical validity. Where an object of the senses is cognized, both of these relations are present together. In the sensory representation of things external to me, the quality of the space wherein we intuit them makes up what is merely subjective in my representation of those things (so that what they may be as objects in themselves stays unsettled), and it is because of this relation that the object, on this account too, is thought only as appearance; space, however, its merely subjective quality notwithstanding, still remains an ingredient in the cognition of things as appearances. Sensation (here the outer sort) expresses, in the same way, what is merely subjective in our representations of things beyond us, but strictly their material (real) ingredient (through which something existent is given), whereas space expresses the mere a priori form of the possibility of intuiting them; and yet sensation too is put to use for cognizing objects beyond us.

Yet the subjective feature of a representation which can never become any component of cognition is the pleasure or displeasure attached to it; for by means of it I cognize nothing about the object represented, even though it may well spring from some cognition as that cognition's effect. The purposiveness of a thing, for its part, insofar as perception represents it, likewise amounts to no property belonging to the object itself (since no such property could be perceived), even if it admits of being inferred from our cognition of things. Purposiveness of this kind, then — which runs ahead of the cognition of an object, indeed which becomes immediately tied to the representation even where one has no wish to employ that representation for cognition — is the representation's subjective side, incapable of ever becoming a component of cognition. The object, accordingly, gets called purposive on this ground alone: that its representation stands in immediate connection with the feeling of pleasure; and this very representation counts as an aesthetic representation of purposiveness. — It remains only to ask whether such a representation of purposiveness so much as exists.

Suppose that pleasure is connected with the bare grasping (apprehensio) of the form belonging to an object of intuition, where that form is not referred to any concept for the sake of a determinate cognition: the representation is then referred, not to the object, but purely to the subject; and the pleasure can amount to nothing beyond the object's fittingness to those cognitive faculties which are at play within the reflecting power of judgment, and so far as they are at play there, hence to nothing beyond a merely subjective and formal purposiveness of the object. For that grasping of forms into the imagination could never occur unless the reflecting power of judgment, even without meaning to, set them side by side at least with its own capacity for referring intuitions to concepts. Now if, in the course of this comparison, a given representation should set the imagination (taken as our faculty for a priori intuitions) unintentionally into agreement with the understanding (taken as our faculty for concepts), and if a feeling of pleasure is thereby awakened, then the object must, in that case, be viewed as purposive for the reflecting power of judgment. A judgment of that sort is an aesthetic judgment upon the purposiveness of the object — one grounded in no already available concept of the thing, and yielding no concept of it either. When the form of an object (not the material of its representation, as sensation) is appraised, in the mere reflection upon it (with no view to a concept to be won from it), as the basis of a pleasure taken in representing such an object: then that pleasure is judged to be necessarily bound to the representation of it as well, and hence to hold not just for the subject who takes in this form, but for every judging being whatever. In that case the object is termed beautiful; and taste is our capacity for judging through a pleasure of this kind (and therefore with universal validity). For since the ground of the pleasure is laid solely in the object's form as it stands for reflection generally, thus in no sensation belonging to the object and equally without any bearing on a concept that would carry some aim: what alone is then at issue is the conformity to law in the empirical exercise of the power of judgment as such (the imagination and the understanding brought into unity) within the subject, a conformity with which the representation of the object accords in reflection, whose conditions are universally valid a priori; and since this concord between the object and the subject's faculties is contingent, it gives rise to the representation of a purposiveness of the object in regard to the subject's cognitive faculties.

Here, then, we have a pleasure which — like every pleasure or displeasure that is not produced through the concept of freedom (that is, through a prior determination of the higher faculty of desire by pure reason) — can never be seen, out of concepts, to attach necessarily to the representation of an object, but has instead to be recognized, on every occasion, as linked with that representation only by way of a reflected perception, and which therefore, as with all empirical judgments, can proclaim no objective necessity nor stake any claim to validity a priori. But the judgment of taste, exactly like any other empirical judgment, sets up only the claim to hold good for everyone, a claim that remains ever possible despite the judgment's inner contingency. The puzzling and exceptional thing lies solely here: that what the judgment of taste demands of everyone, and asks to be attached to the representation of the object — treating it as though it were a predicate joined to the cognition of the object — is not an empirical concept at all, but a feeling of pleasure (and so no concept whatever).

A single empirical judgment — say, that of a person who notices a mobile droplet of water enclosed within a rock crystal — rightly requires that anyone else must find the matter just as he does, since he has passed this judgment according to the general conditions of the determining power of judgment, beneath the laws governing any possible experience whatever. In precisely the same way, someone who takes pleasure in merely reflecting on an object's form, leaving any concept aside — although his judgment is empirical and a single one — rightly puts forward a claim to the agreement of everyone: for the ground of this pleasure is discovered in the general, albeit subjective, condition governing reflecting judgments, namely in the purposive accord of an object (be it nature's own product or a work of art) with that reciprocal relation among the cognitive faculties (imagination and understanding) demanded by every empirical cognition. Within the judgment of taste, therefore, the pleasure does depend upon an empirical representation and admits of no a priori tie to any concept (one is unable to settle a priori whether a given object will suit taste or fail to; it has to be tried out); yet it serves as the determining ground of this judgment only insofar as one is aware that it rests upon nothing but reflection, together with the general — though merely subjective — conditions under which such reflection accords with the cognition of objects at large, an accord for which the object's form is purposive.

This is why the judgments of taste, in respect of their very possibility, stand subject to a critique as well — since that possibility presupposes a principle a priori — even though the principle in question is neither a cognitive principle for the understanding nor a practical one for the will, and hence determines nothing whatever a priori.

But our susceptibility to a pleasure that springs from reflecting on the forms of things (those of nature no less than those of art) marks out not merely a purposiveness of the objects, relative to the reflecting power of judgment and answering to the concept of nature, as lodged in the subject, but conversely a purposiveness of the subject too, with respect to the objects — as regards their form, indeed even their want of form — answering to the concept of freedom; and by this means it comes to pass: that the aesthetic judgment is referred not only, qua judgment of taste, to the beautiful, but also, as sprung from a feeling of spirit, to the sublime, so that the critique of the aesthetic power of judgment has to break apart into two principal divisions matching these two.

VIII. On the logical representation of nature's purposiveness

In an object that is given in experience, a purposiveness can be represented in either of two ways: either on a merely subjective ground — as the accord of its form, in the apprehension (apprehensio) of that object antecedently to any concept, with our faculties of cognition, so as to bring intuition together with concepts into a cognition as such; or on an objective ground — as the accord of its form with the very possibility of the thing, in conformity with a concept of that thing which precedes it and holds within it the ground of this form. We have already seen: that a representation of purposiveness of the first kind is grounded in the immediate pleasure taken in the object's form through mere reflection upon it; the second, by contrast, since it relates the object's form not to the subject's faculties of cognition as they take it up, but to a determinate cognition of the object falling under a given concept, is concerned not with any feeling of pleasure taken in things, but with the understanding as it judges them. Where a concept of an object is already given, the business of the power of judgment, when it employs that concept toward cognition, consists in presentation (exhibitio) — that is, in placing alongside the concept an intuition answering to it: whether this comes about through our own power of imagination, as art itself shows, when we realize a previously formed concept of an object that serves as an end for us, or through nature by way of its technique (as in organized bodies), when we set our concept of an end under nature's product so as to judge it; and in such a case what comes to be represented is not simply a purposiveness belonging to nature in the form of the thing, but this product of hers regarded as a natural end. — Now although the concept we frame of a subjective purposiveness in nature's forms, following empirical laws, is in no way a concept drawn from the object, but merely a principle by which the power of judgment provides itself with concepts amid this immense manifold of hers (and can thereby orient itself within it): even so, through this very step we ascribe to nature, as it were, a consideration for our faculty of cognition modeled on the analogy of an end; and thus we are able to view natural beauty as the presentation of a concept of formal purposiveness (one merely subjective), whereas natural ends count as the presentation of a concept of real purposiveness (an objective one) — of which we appraise the first through taste (aesthetically, by means of the feeling of pleasure), and the second through understanding and reason (logically, according to concepts).

On this is founded the way in which the critique of the power of judgment is divided — into one of the aesthetic and one of the teleological power of judgment: for under the first is understood the faculty that appraises formal purposiveness (called subjective in other contexts) by means of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, while under the second is understood the faculty that appraises nature's real (objective) purposiveness by means of understanding and reason.

In any critique of the power of judgment, the portion dealing with the aesthetic power of judgment is essential to the whole, since this alone harbors a principle that the power of judgment lays entirely a priori beneath its reflection upon nature — namely the principle of a formal purposiveness of nature, conforming to its particular (empirical) laws, on behalf of our faculty of cognition, and without such purposiveness the understanding could not find its way about in nature: whereas not a single ground can be given a priori at all, nor is even the mere possibility of it rendered evident from the concept of a nature taken as an object of experience — whether at large or in particular — namely that objective ends of nature must exist, in other words things that are possible only as natural ends; instead, the power of judgment by itself, containing no such a priori principle within it, does hold the rule, in the instances that arise (those of certain products), for making use of the concept of ends on reason's behalf, once that transcendental principle has already prepared the understanding to bring the concept of an end (at least as regards form) to bear upon nature.

The transcendental principle, on the other hand — the principle of representing to ourselves, upon the form of a thing, a purposiveness of nature that bears subjectively on our faculty of cognition, and of treating this as a principle for appraising that thing — leaves entirely open where and in what cases I am to carry out such appraisal, namely as the appraisal of some product that comes under a principle of purposiveness and not merely under nature's general laws, and it turns over to the aesthetic power of judgment the business of making out, in taste, how well that product (its form) accords with our faculties of cognition (so far as this faculty decides the matter not by concord with concepts but by way of feeling). The teleologically employed power of judgment, on the contrary, specifies with exactness the conditions under which a thing (an organized body, say) is to be judged according to the idea of a natural end; yet from the concept of nature as an object of experience it can put forward no fundamental proposition licensing us to assign to nature any relation to ends a priori, nor even, in an indeterminate way, to take such a relation from what we actually experience in products of this kind: and the reason for this is that many particular experiences have to be set up and surveyed under the unity of their principle before an objective purposiveness in some given object can be cognized — and even so, only empirically. — The aesthetic power of judgment is thus a faculty all its own, one for judging things by a rule and not by concepts. The teleological power of judgment is not a faculty of a special sort; it is nothing but the reflecting power of judgment in general, so far as it operates, as everywhere within theoretical cognition, by concepts, though in regard to certain objects of nature it works by principles of a special kind — those of a power of judgment that merely reflects and does not determine its objects — and hence, according to its use, it belongs to the theoretical branch of philosophy, while, on account of those special principles which lack the determining character a doctrine would require of them, it must at the same time constitute a part of the critique all its own; the aesthetic power of judgment, by contrast, contributes nothing whatever to the cognition of its objects, and so must be counted only toward the critique of the subject that judges and of the faculties of cognition that belong to it, so far as these prove capable of a priori principles, no matter which use (theoretical or practical) they may in other respects serve — a critique that constitutes the propaedeutic of all philosophy.

IX. On the connection of the legislations of the understanding and of reason through the power of judgment

It is for nature, taken as an object of the senses, that the understanding gives the law a priori, so as to yield a theoretical cognition of nature within a possible experience. Reason, in turn, legislates a priori for freedom and for freedom's own causality, as the supersensible in the subject, with an unconditionally practical cognition in view. The domain that falls under the concept of nature by virtue of the first legislation, and the domain that falls under the concept of freedom by virtue of the second, are wholly insulated from every reciprocal influence they might otherwise exert on one another in their own right (each according to its fundamental laws), by the immense gulf that divides the supersensible from appearances. Nothing is settled by the concept of freedom as regards a theoretical cognition of nature, and just as little is settled by the concept of nature as regards the practical laws of freedom: to this extent it remains impossible to throw a bridge across from the one domain over to the other. — Yet although the determining grounds of the causality that accords with the concept of freedom (together with the practical rule it holds) have no place in nature, and although what is sensible cannot determine the supersensible within the subject, the converse is nonetheless possible (not, admittedly, as regards the cognition of nature, but certainly as regards the consequences that flow from the former into the latter) and is already implicit in the concept of a causality operating through freedom, whose effect is to occur in the world in conformity with that causality's own formal laws — even though the word cause, when predicated of the supersensible, denotes only the ground that determines the causality of natural things toward an effect in keeping with their own natural laws, yet determines it at the same time in agreement with the formal principle of reason's own laws, a possibility that admittedly cannot be grasped, though the objection that alleges a purported contradiction lodged in it can be sufficiently refuted². — The effect that follows upon the concept of freedom is that final end which (or whose appearance in the sensible world) ought to exist, and for which the condition of its possibility is presupposed as lying within nature (that is, in the subject's own nature as a sensible being, namely as a human being). The power of judgment, which presupposes this a priori and with no eye to the practical, puts into our hands, within the concept of a purposiveness of nature, that mediating concept standing between nature's concepts and the concept of freedom — the concept that opens the way from the pure theoretical over to the pure practical, from conformity to law according to the former to the final end according to the latter; for through it there is cognized the possibility of the final end, a possibility that can be realized nowhere but in nature and in accord with nature's laws.

By the very possibility of the laws it prescribes a priori to nature, the understanding supplies a proof that nature is cognized by us merely as appearance , and so at the same time gives an indication of a supersensible substratum underlying it, while leaving that substratum entirely undetermined. The power of judgment, by means of its a priori principle for judging nature according to its possible particular laws, secures for that supersensible substratum (within us as much as outside us) determinability through the intellectual faculty. Reason, however, bestows upon this same substratum the determination through its practical law a priori; and thus it is the power of judgment that makes possible the passage out of the domain of the concept of nature and into that of the concept of freedom.

Taking the powers of the soul at large, insofar as they are considered as higher powers — that is, as powers that contain an autonomy of their own — the faculty of cognition (the theoretical faculty, directed at nature) finds in the understanding that power which holds the constitutive principles a priori; the feeling of pleasure and displeasure finds this in the power of judgment, taken apart from such concepts and sensations as bear on determining the faculty of desire and could thereby be practical without mediation; and the faculty of desire finds it in reason, practical as reason is without any pleasure intervening, from whatever quarter that pleasure might come, and determining for this faculty, in its capacity as higher power, the final end that brings along with it the pure intellectual satisfaction taken in the object. — The power of judgment's concept of a purposiveness of nature is still one that belongs to the concepts of nature , serving there merely as a regulative principle for the faculty of cognition, even though the aesthetic judgment about certain objects (whether of nature or of art), which occasions that concept, is a constitutive principle as far as the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is concerned. The spontaneity that is at work in the interplay of the cognitive powers, whose mutual accord furnishes the ground of this pleasure, is what makes the concept in question fit to mediate the linkage of the domains of the concept of nature with that of freedom in respect of their consequences, since this spontaneity at once fosters the mind's receptivity to moral feeling. — The following table may make it easier to survey all the higher powers in their systematic unity³.

Division of the Whole Work

Of the Critique of the Power of Judgment

First Part. Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment

First Section. Analytic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment

First Book. Analytic of the Beautiful

First Moment of the Judgment of Taste, as to Quality

§ 1. The judgment of taste is aesthetic

To settle whether something is beautiful or not, we do not refer the representation to the object for cognition by means of the understanding; instead we refer it, by means of the imagination (perhaps conjoined with the understanding), to the subject and to its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Accordingly, a judgment of taste is not a judgment of cognition and so is not logical but aesthetic — where by the latter is meant one whose determining ground can be nothing but subjective. Any relation among representations, even a relation among sensations, admits of being objective (in which case it denotes the real of an empirical representation) — with one exception: the relation to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, by which nothing at all gets marked out in the object, and in which, rather, the subject feels its own self as it is affected by the representation.

Apprehending a regular and purposive building with one's cognitive faculty (be the mode of representation distinct or confused) is quite another matter than being aware of that same representation as attended by the sensation of satisfaction. In this latter case the representation is referred wholly to the subject — specifically to the subject's feeling of life, under the heading of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure — and this founds an entirely peculiar faculty of discrimination and judging that adds nothing to cognition, but only sets the given representation within the subject over against the entire faculty of representations, of which the mind grows aware in feeling its own condition. The representations given within a judgment may be empirical, and thus aesthetic; but the judgment reached by their means is logical so long as they are referred, within that judgment, merely to the object. The reverse also holds: should the given representations be rational outright, yet within a judgment be referred solely to the subject (to its feeling), they are, just so far, invariably aesthetic.

§ 2. The satisfaction which determines the judgment of taste is devoid of all interest

That satisfaction which we link to the representation of an object's existence is called interest. Such a satisfaction accordingly always relates as well to the faculty of desire, either as the ground determining it or at least as necessarily bound up with what determines it. Yet when the question arises whether something is beautiful, one does not wish to know whether the existence of the thing is of any concern, or could even be of concern, to us or to anyone at all; but rather how we judge it in mere contemplation (intuition or reflection). Should anyone ask me whether the palace standing before my eyes strikes me as beautiful, I might well answer that I care nothing for such structures, built solely to be stared at, or, in the manner of that Iroquois sachem, that in Paris no place delighted him more than the eating-houses; beyond this I could, thoroughly in the Rousseauian vein, decry the vanity of the great, who lavish the people's sweat upon things so needless; and I might in the end persuade myself readily enough that, cast away on some uninhabited isle with no prospect of ever rejoining humankind, and able by a mere wish to summon such a splendid edifice into being, I would not stir myself even that much, provided I already possessed a hut affording me sufficient comfort. One may grant me all of this and give it approval; yet none of that is now the point under discussion. All one seeks to know is whether the mere representation of the object is accompanied within me by satisfaction, however indifferent I might remain regarding the existence of the object that this representation concerns. It is readily apparent that, when I declare it beautiful and demonstrate my possession of taste, everything turns on what I myself draw from this representation, rather than on that in which I remain dependent upon the object's existence. Everyone is bound to concede that any verdict upon beauty tainted by the slightest interest is thoroughly partial and no pure judgment of taste. To sit in judgment on questions of taste, one must harbor not the slightest partiality toward the thing's existence, but must remain wholly indifferent in this regard.

This proposition, however, being of outstanding importance, can be clarified in no better way than by setting the pure, disinterested⁴ satisfaction in the judgment of taste against that which is combined with interest: above all when we may at the same time be assured that there exist no further kinds of interest beyond those that are just now to be named.

§ 3. The satisfaction in the agreeable is combined with interest

That is agreeable which pleases the senses in sensation. Here at once an occasion presents itself to censure a very common confusion of the twofold meaning that the word sensation can carry, and to draw attention to it. All satisfaction (so one says or thinks) is itself sensation (of a pleasure). Consequently everything that pleases is, precisely in this, that it pleases, agreeable (and, according to the various degrees, or also relations to other agreeable sensations, graceful, lovely, delightful, gladdening and so forth). Once that is granted, however, then—as regards the effect on the feeling of pleasure—it is wholly indifferent whether inclination is determined by impressions of the senses, the will by principles of reason, or the power of judgment by mere reflected forms of intuition. For this effect would be the agreeableness in the sensation of one's own state, and since, after all, all working of our faculties must ultimately issue in the practical and converge there as in its goal, one could ask of them no other appraisal of things and of their worth than the one that consists in the gratification they promise. The manner in which they arrive at it is in the end of no consequence at all; and since here the choice of means alone can make any difference, human beings might indeed charge one another with folly and want of understanding, but never with baseness and malice: for after all they are, each according to his own way of viewing things, running toward one goal, which for everyone is gratification.

The word sensation, when applied to a determination of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, means something wholly other than it does when I apply it to the representation of a thing (given through the senses, as a receptivity pertaining to the faculty of cognition). For in the latter instance the representation is related to the object, whereas in the former it is connected merely with the subject and contributes to no cognition at all, not even to that whereby the subject cognizes itself.

In the above explanation, though, the word sensation stands for us as an objective representation of the senses; and, in order not to risk perpetual misinterpretation, we will designate whatever must forever remain purely subjective, and can by no means amount to a representation of an object, with the name otherwise customary for it, namely feeling. As the perception of an object of sense, the meadows' green color pertains to objective sensation; its agreeableness, however, pertains to subjective sensation, whereby no object at all is represented—that is, to feeling, whereby the object comes to be regarded as an object of satisfaction (which involves no cognition of it).

That my judgment concerning an object—by which I pronounce it agreeable—gives expression to an interest in it is already evident from this: that by means of sensation it arouses a craving for objects of that sort, so that the satisfaction presupposes, not the bare judging of the object, but rather the relation of its existence to my own state insofar as that state is affected by such an object. Hence of the agreeable one does not merely say: it pleases, but rather: it gratifies. It is not a mere assent that I bestow on it; rather, inclination is thereby produced; and to that which is agreeable in the liveliest way there belongs so utterly no judgment about the constitution of the object that those who are ever bent solely on enjoyment (for that is the word by which one denotes the inwardness of gratification) gladly excuse themselves from all judging.

§ 4. The satisfaction in the good is connected with an interest

Good is what pleases through the mere concept, by way of reason. We call some things good for something (the useful), which please only as a means; but others good in themselves, which please for their own sake. Each of these harbors, without exception, the concept of an end, and thus reason's bearing upon a willing that is at least possible, so that a satisfaction attaches to the existence of an object or of an action—in other words, an interest of some sort.

To find something good, I must in every case know what kind of thing the object is meant to be, that is, have a concept of it. To find beauty in something, I have no need of that. Flowers, free-hand drawings, tracery aimlessly wound into one another under the label of foliage—these mean nothing, rest upon no determinate concept, and please all the same. Satisfaction in the beautiful, by contrast, has to depend on reflecting upon an object—a reflection issuing in some concept or another, no matter which—and just here lies its difference from the agreeable, whose whole basis is sensation.

Admittedly, the agreeable seems in many cases to coincide with the good. Thus people will commonly say: every enjoyment (especially the lasting kind) is good in itself; which comes to roughly this, that to be lastingly agreeable or to be good is one and the same. Yet one soon notices that this is merely a faulty exchange of words, since the concepts that properly belong to these expressions can in no way be substituted for one another. As something agreeable, the agreeable presents an object merely in its bearing on sense; to be termed good as an object of the will, it has to be ranged under principles of reason by means of the concept of an end in the first place. That a quite different relation to the satisfaction is at stake once I call good the very thing that gives me pleasure becomes evident from the following: in the case of the good one always asks whether the thing is good only in a mediate way or good directly (that is, useful or good in itself), while in the case of the agreeable such a question cannot even arise, for that word always denotes whatever pleases at once. (It stands just the same way, too, with what I call beautiful.)

Even in the most ordinary discourse people distinguish the agreeable from the good. Of a dish that heightens the taste through spices and other additions, one says without hesitation that it is agreeable, while at the same time granting that it is not good: for although it immediately pleases the senses, mediately, that is, considered through reason, which looks to the consequences, it displeases. Even in the judging of health one can still notice this distinction. To everyone who possesses it, it is immediately agreeable (at least negatively, that is, as the keeping away of every bodily pain). But to pronounce it good, one must still, by means of reason, direct it toward ends, namely that it is a state which makes us disposed for all our affairs. With respect to happiness, everyone in the end nonetheless believes that he may call the greatest sum (in quantity as well as duration) of the agreeablenesses of life a true, indeed even the highest, good. Yet against this too reason revolts. Agreeableness is enjoyment. But if it is aimed at this alone, then it would be foolish to be scrupulous about the means that procure it for us, whether it were obtained passively, from the generosity of nature, or through our own activity and doing. But that the existence of a human being should have a worth in itself, one who merely lives (and however busily occupied he may be to that end) in order to enjoy, even if in doing so he were, as a means thereto, of the utmost service to others who likewise all aim solely at enjoyment, and this because through sympathy he shared in all their pleasure: of this reason will never let itself be convinced. Only through what he does without regard to enjoyment, in complete freedom and independently of whatever nature might procure for him even passively, does he give to his existence, as the existence of a person, an absolute worth; and happiness, with the entire fullness of its agreeableness, is far from being an unconditioned good⁵.

Yet for all the ways in which the agreeable and the good diverge, they still agree on one point: each is invariably bound up with an interest taken in its object—not merely the agreeable, § 3, together with what is good in mediate fashion (the useful, pleasing as a means toward one agreeableness or another), but likewise that which is good outright and in every respect, namely the moral, which carries the supreme interest along with it. For the good is the object of the will (that is, of a power of desire determined through reason). But to will a thing and to take a satisfaction in the existence of that thing, which is to say, to take an interest in it, amount to one and the same.

§ 5. Comparison of the three specifically distinct kinds of satisfaction

Both the agreeable and the good stand in a relation to the faculty of desire, and on that account each brings with it a satisfaction—the one pathologically conditioned (by incentives, stimulos), the other purely practical—whose determining ground lies not in the representation of the object alone but likewise in the subject's represented connection with that object's existence. Not merely the object, but its existence as well, is what pleases. The judgment of taste, on the other hand, is purely contemplative, that is, a judgment that, remaining indifferent toward whether an object exists, merely sets the object's character alongside the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. This contemplation, however, is for its own part not directed toward concepts; for a judgment of taste is no cognitive judgment (be it theoretical or practical), and accordingly it is neither grounded upon concepts nor aimed at any such.

Thus the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good designate three different relations that representations have to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, in regard to which we set objects or kinds of representation off from one another. Moreover, the expressions suited to each, by which one designates the complacency in them, are not one and the same. Agreeable is the name a person gives to whatever delights him; beautiful, to what he simply finds pleasing; good, to what he prizes, approves, that is, to that in which he posits an objective worth. Agreeableness holds also for non-rational animals; beauty only for human beings, i.e., animal but nonetheless rational beings, yet also not merely as such (e.g., spirits), but at the same time as animal ones; the good, however, for every rational being in general; a proposition that can receive its complete justification and explanation only in what follows. One may observe that the satisfaction which taste takes in the beautiful stands alone among these three kinds of satisfaction as a disinterested and free one; for no interest, whether of the senses or of reason, compels the approval. Hence one could say of satisfaction that in the three cases mentioned it refers to inclination, or to favor, or to respect. For favor is the sole free satisfaction. An object of inclination, and one which a law of reason enjoins upon us for the purpose of desiring, allow us no freedom to make of anything whatsoever an object of pleasure for ourselves. Every interest presupposes a need, or else calls one forth; and once it serves as the determining ground of approval, it leaves the judgment upon the object no longer free.

As regards the interest that inclination takes in the agreeable, everyone says: hunger is the best cook, and to people of healthy appetite everything is palatable that is at all edible; hence such a satisfaction proves no choice governed by taste. It is only when the need has been met that one can tell, among many people, who has taste and who does not. In the very same way there are manners (Conduite) without virtue, courtesy without benevolence, decency without honorableness, and so forth. For wherever the ethical law pronounces, there is objectively no further free choice regarding what ought to be done; and to exhibit taste in one's conduct (or in judging that of others) is something quite other than to give voice to one's moral cast of mind: for the latter contains a command and brings forth a need, whereas ethical taste, by contrast, merely toys with the objects of satisfaction without binding itself to any one of them.

Explanation of the beautiful, inferred from the first moment.

Taste is the capacity for appraising an object, or a mode of representation, by means of a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest whatever. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful.

Second Moment of the Judgment of Taste, namely as to its Quantity