APPENDIX Theory of the Method of Teleological Judgement	416
§ 79 Whether teleology must be treated as a branch of natural science
EVERY science must have its definite position in the complete encyclopedia of the sciences. If it is a philosophical science its position must be assigned to it either in the theoretical or the practical division. Further, if its place is in the theoretical division, then the position assigned to it must either be in natural science—which is its proper position when it considers things capable of being objects of experience—consequently in physics proper, psychology, or cosmology, or else in theology—as the science of the original source of the world as the sum of all objects of experience.
Now the question arises: What position does teleology deserve? Is it a branch of natural science, properly so called, or of theology? A branch of one or the other it must be; for no science can belong to the transition from one to the other, because this only signifies the articulation or the organization of the system and not a position in it.
That it does not form a constituent part of theology, although the use that may there be made of it is most important, is evident from the nature of the case. For its objects are the productions of nature and their cause; and, although it points to this cause as a ground residing beyond and above nature, namely a Divine Author, yet it does not do so for determining judgement. It only points to this cause in the interests of reflective judgement engaged in surveying nature, its purpose being to guide our judging of the things in the world by means of the idea of such a ground, as a regulative principle, in a manner adapted to our human understanding.
But just as little does it appear to form a part of natural science. For this science requires determining, and not merely reflective, principles for the purpose of assigning objective grounds of natural effects. As a matter of fact, also, the theory of nature, or the mechanical explanation of its phenomena by efficient causes, is in no way helped by considering them in the light of the correlation of ends. The exposition of the ends pursued by nature in its products, so far as such ends form a system according to teleological concepts, belongs strictly speaking only to a description of nature that follows a particular guiding thread. Here reason does fine work, and work that is full of practical purposeiveness from various points of view. But it gives no information whatever as to the origin and intrinsic possibility of these forms. Yet this is what specially concerns the theoretical science of nature.	417
Teleology, therefore, in the form of a science, is not a branch of doctrine at all, but only of critique, and of the critique of a particular cognitive faculty, namely that of judgement. But it does contain a priori principles, and to that extent it may, and in fact must, specify the method by which nature has to be judged according to the principle of final causes. In this way the science of its methodical application exerts at least a negative influence upon the procedure to be adopted in the theoretical science of nature. It also in the same way affects the metaphysical bearing which this science may have on theology, when the former is treated as a propaedeutic to the latter.
§ 80 The necessary subordination of the principle of mechanism to the teleological principle in the explanation of a thing regarded as a natural end
OUR right to aim at an explanation of all natural products on simply mechanical lines is in itself quite unrestricted. But the constitution of our understanding, as engaged upon things in the shape of natural ends, is such that our power of meeting all demands from the unaided resources of mechanical explanation is not only very limited, but is also circumscribed within clearly marked bounds. For by a principle of judgement that adopts the above procedure alone nothing whatever can be accomplished in the way of explaining natural ends. For this reason our judging of such products must also at all times be subordinated to a teleological principle.
Hence there is reason, and indeed merit, in pursuing the mechanism of nature for the purpose of explaining natural products so far as this can be done with probable success, and in fact never abandoning this attempt on the ground that it is intrinsically impossible to encounter the purposiveness of nature along this road, but only on the ground that it is impossible for us as human beings. For in order to succeed along this line of investigation we should require an intuition different from our sensuous intuition and a determinate knowledge of the intelligible substrate of nature—a substrate from which we could show the reason of the very mechanism of phenomena in their particular laws. But this wholly surpasses our capacity.	418
So where it is established beyond question that the concept of a natural end applies to things, as in the case of organized beings, if the investigator of nature is not simply to waste his labour, he must always in judging them accept some original organization or other as fundamental. He must consider that this organization avails itself of the very mechanism above mentioned for the purpose of producing other organic forms, or for evolving new structures from those given—such new structures, however, always issuing from and in accordance with the end in question.
It is praiseworthy to employ a comparative anatomy and go through the vast creation of organized natural beings in order to see if there is not discoverable in it something resembling a system, especially with respect to the principle of their productions. For otherwise we should be obliged to content ourselves with the mere principle of judging—which tells us nothing that gives any insight into the production of such beings—and to abandon in despair all claim to insight into nature in this field. When we consider the agreement of so many genera of animals in a certain common schema, which apparently underlies not only the structure of their bones, but also the arrangement of their remaining parts, and when we find here the wonderful simplicity of the original plan, which has been able to produce such an immense variety of species by the shortening of one part and the lengthening of another, by the involution of this part and the evolution of that, there gleams upon the mind a ray of hope, however faint, that the principle of the mechanism of nature, apart from which there can be no natural science at all, may yet enable us to arrive at some explanation in the case of organic life. This analogy of forms, which in all their differences seem to be produced in accordance with a common type, strengthens the suspicion that they have an actual kinship due to descent from a common parent. This we might trace in the gradual approximation of one animal species to another, from that in which the principle of ends seems best authenticated, namely from man, back to the polyp, and from this back even to mosses and lichens, and finally to the lowest perceivable stage of nature. Here we come to crude matter; and from this, and the forces which it exerts in accordance with mechanical laws (laws resembling those by which it acts in the formation of crystals) seems to be developed the whole technic of nature which, in the case of organized beings, is so incomprehensible to us that we feel obliged to imagine a different principle for its explanation.	419
Here the archaeologist of nature is at liberty to go back to the traces that remain of nature’s earliest revolutions, and, appealing to all he knows of or can conjecture about its mechanism, to trace the genesis of that great family of living things (for it must be pictured as a family if there is to be any foundation for the consistently coherent affinity mentioned). He can suppose that the womb of mother earth as it first emerged, like a huge animal, from its chaotic state, gave birth to creatures whose form displayed less purposiveness, and that these again bore others which adapted themselves more perfectly to their native surroundings and their relations to each other, until this womb, becoming rigid and ossified, restricted its birth to definite species incapable of further modification, and the multiplicity of forms was fixed as it stood when the operation of that fruitful formative power had ceased.—Yet, for all that, he is obliged eventually to attribute to this universal mother an organization suitably constituted with a view to all these forms of life, for unless he does so, the possibility of the purposive form of the products of the animal and plant kingdoms is quite unthinkable.1 But when he does attribute all this to nature he has only pushed the explanation a stage farther back. He cannot pretend to have made the genesis of those two kingdoms intelligible independently of the condition of final causes.	420
Even as regards the alteration which certain individuals of the organized genera contingently undergo, where we find that the character thus altered is transmitted and taken up into the generative power, we can form no other plausible judgement of it than that it is an occasional development of a purposive capacity originally present in the species with a view to the preservation of the kind. For in the complete inner purposiveness of an organized being, the generation of its like is intimately associated with the condition that nothing shall be taken up into the generative force which does not also belong, in such a system of ends, to one of its undeveloped original capacities. Once we depart from this principle we cannot know with certainty whether many constituents of the form at present found in a species may not be of equally contingent and purposeless origin, and the principle of teleology, that nothing in an organized being which is preserved in the propagation of the species should be judged as devoid of purposiveness, would be made very unreliable and could only hold good for the parent stock, to which our knowledge does not reach.
In reply to those who feel obliged to adopt a teleological principle of critical judgement, that is an architectonic understanding in the case of all such natural ends, Hume raises the objection* that one might ask with equal justice how such an understanding is itself possible. By this he means that one may also ask how it is possible that there should be such a teleological coincidence in one being of the manifold faculties and properties presupposed in the very concept of an understanding which also possesses a productive power. But there is nothing in this point. For the whole difficulty that besets the question as to the genesis of a thing that involves ends and that is solely comprehensible by their means rests upon the demand for unity in the source of the synthesis of the multiplicity of externally existing elements in this product. For, if this source is laid in the understanding of a productive cause regarded as a simple substance, the above question, as a teleological problem, is abundantly answered, whereas if the cause is merely sought in matter, as an aggregate of many externally existing substances, the unity of principle requisite for the intrinsically purposive form of its complex structures is wholly absent. The autocracy of matter in productions that for our understanding are only conceivable as ends, is a word with no meaning.	421
This is the reason why those who look for a supreme ground of the possibility of the objectively purposive forms of matter, and yet do not concede an understanding to this ground, choose nevertheless to make the world-whole either an all-embracing substance (pantheism), or else—what is only the preceding in more defined form—a complex of many determinations inhering in a single simple substance (Spinozism). Their object is to derive from this substance that unity of source which all purposiveness presupposes. And in fact, thanks to their purely onto-logical concept of a simple substance, they really do something to satisfy one condition of the problem—namely, that of the unity implied in the reference to an end. But they have nothing to say on the subject of the other condition, namely the relation of the substance to its consequence regarded as an end, this relation being what gives to their ontological ground the more precise determination which the problem demands. The result is that they in no way answer the entire problem. Also for our understanding it remains absolutely unanswerable except on the following terms. First, the original source of things must be pictured by us as a simple substance. Then its attribute, as simple substance, in its relation to the specific character of the natural forms whose source it is—the character, namely, of purposive unity—must be pictured as the attribute of an intelligent substance. Lastly, the relation of this intelligent substance to the natural forms must, owing to the contingency which we find in everything which we imagine to be possible only as an end, be pictured as one of causality.
§ 81 The association of mechanism with the teleological principle which we apply to the explanation of a natural end considered as a product of nature
WE have seen from the preceding section that the mechanism of nature is not sufficient to enable us to conceive the possibility of an organized being, but that it must ultimately be subordinated to a cause acting by design—or, at least, that the type of our cognitive faculty is such that we must conceive it to be so subordinated. But just as little can the mere teleological source of a being of this kind enable us to consider and to judge it as at once an end and a product of nature. With that teleological source we must further associate the mechanism of nature as a sort of instrument of a cause acting by design and to whose ends nature is subordinated even in its mechanical laws. The possibility of such a union of two completely different types of causality, namely that of nature in its universal conformity to law and that of an idea which restricts nature to a particular form of which nature, as nature, is in no way the source, is something which our reason does not comprehend. For it resides in the supersensible substrate of nature, of which we are unable to make any definite affirmation, further than that it is the self-subsistent being of which we know merely the phenomenon. Yet, for all that, this principle remains in full and undiminished force, that everything which we assume to form part of phenomenal nature and to be its product must be thought as connected with nature according to mechanical laws. For, apart from this type of causality, organized beings, although they are ends of nature, would not be natural products.	422
Now supposing we adopt the teleological principle of the production of organized beings, as indeed we cannot avoid doing, we may base their internally purposive form either on the occasionalism or on the pre-establishment of the cause. According to occasionalism the Supreme Cause of the world would directly supply the organic formation, stamped with the impress of its own idea, on the occasion of each impregnation, to the commingling substances united in the generative process. On the system of pre-establishment the Supreme Cause would only endow the original products of its wisdom with the inherent capacity by means of which an organized being produces another after its own kind, and the species preserves its continuous existence, whilst the loss of individuals is ever being repaired through the agency of a nature that simultaneously labours towards their destruction. If the occasionalism of the production of organized beings is assumed, all co-operation of nature in the process is entirely lost, and no room is left for the exercise of reason in judging of the possibility of products of this kind. So we may take it for granted that no one will embrace this system who cares anything for philosophy.
Again the system of pre-establishment may take either of two forms. Thus it treats every organized being produced from one of its own kind either as its educt or as its product. The system which regards the generations as educts is termed that of individual preformation, or, sometimes, the theory of evolution; that which regards them as products is called the system of epigenesis. The latter may also be called the system of generic preformation, inasmuch as it regards the productive capacity of the parents, in respect of the inner purposive tendency that would be part of their original stock, and, therefore, the specific form, as still having been virtualiter preformed. On this statement the opposite theory of individual preformation might also more appropriately be called the theory of involution (or encasement).	423
The advocates of the theory of evolution exclude all individuals from the formative force of nature, for the purpose of deriving them directly from the hand of the creator. Yet they would not venture to describe the occurrence on the lines of the hypothesis of occasionalism, so as to make the impregnation an idle formality, which takes place whenever a supreme intelligent cause of the world has made up his mind to form a foetus directly with his own hand and relegate to the mother the mere task of developing and nourishing it. They would avow adherence to the theory of preformation; as if it were not a matter of indifference whether a supernatural origin of such forms is allowed to take place at the start or in the course of the world-process. They fail to see that in fact a whole host of supernatural contrivances would be spared by acts of creation as occasion arose, which would be required if an embryo formed at the beginning of the world had to be preserved from the destructive forces of nature, and had to keep safe and sound all through the long ages till the day arrived for its development, and also that an incalculably greater number of such preformed entities would be created than would be destined ever to develop, and that all those would be so many creations thus rendered superfluous and in vain. Yet they would like to leave nature some role in these operations, so as not to lapse into an unmitigated hyperphysics that can dispense with all explanation on naturalistic lines. Of course they would still remain unshaken in their hyperphysics; so much so that they would discover even in miscarriages—which yet cannot possibly be deemed ends of nature—a marvellous purposiveness, even if it be directed to no better end than that of being a purposiveless purposiveness intended to set some chance anatomist at his wit’s end, and make him fall on his knees with admiration. However, they would be absolutely unable to make the generation of hybrids fit in with the system of preformation, but would be compelled to allow to the seed of the male creature, to which in other cases they had denied all but the mechanical property of serving as the first means of nourishment for the embryo, a further and additional formative force directed to ends. And yet they would not concede this force to either of the two parents when dealing with the complete product of two creatures of the same genus.	424
As against this, even supposing we failed to see the enormous advantage on the side of the advocate of epigenesis in the matter of empirical evidence in support of this theory, still reason would antecedently be strongly prepossessed in favour of this line of explanation. For as regards things the possibility of whose origin can only be represented to the mind according to a causality of ends, epigenesis nonetheless regards nature as at least itself productive in respect of the continuation of the process, and not as merely unfolding something. Thus with the least possible expenditure of the supernatural it entrusts to nature the explanation of all steps subsequent to the original beginning. But it refrains from determining anything as to this original beginning, which is what baffles all the attempts of physics, no matter what chain of causes it adopts.
No one has rendered more valuable services in connexion with this theory of epigenesis than Herr Hofr. Blumenbach.* This is as true of what he has done towards establishing the correct principles of its application—partly by setting due bounds to an overly free employment of it—as it is of his contributions to its proof. He makes organic substance the starting-point for physical explanation of these formations. For to suppose that crude matter, obeying mechanical laws, was originally its own architect, that life could have sprung up from the nature of what is void of life, and matter have spontaneously adopted the form of a self-maintaining purposiveness, he justly declares to be contrary to reason. But at the same time he leaves to the mechanism of nature, in its subordination to this inscrutable principle of a primordial organization, an indeterminable yet also unmistakable function. The capacity of matter here required he terms—in contradistinction to the simply mechanical formative force universally residing in it—in the case of an organized body a formative impulse, standing, so to speak, under the higher guidance and direction of the above principle.
§ 82 The teleological system in the extrinsic relations of organisms	425
BY extrinsic purposiveness I mean the purposiveness that exists where one thing in nature subserves another as means to an end. Now even things which do not possess any intrinsic purposiveness, and whose possibility does not imply any, such as earth, air, water, and the like, may nevertheless extrinsically, that is in relation to other beings, be very well adapted to ends. But then those other beings must in all cases be organized, that is be natural ends, for unless they are ends the former could not be considered means. Thus water, air, and earth cannot be regarded as means to the emergence of mountains. For intrinsically there is nothing in mountains that calls for a source of their possibility according to ends. Hence their cause can never be referred to such a source and represented under the predicate of a means subservient thereto.
Extrinsic purposiveness is an entirely different concept from that of intrinsic purposiveness, the latter being connected with the possibility of an object irrespective of whether its actuality is itself an end or not. In the case of an organism we may further inquire: For what end does it exist? But we can hardly do so in the case of things in which we recognize the simple effect of the mechanism of nature. The reason is that in the case of organisms we have already represented to ourselves a causality according to ends—a creative understanding—to account for their intrinsic purposiveness, and have referred this active faculty to its determining ground, the design. One extrinsic purposiveness is the single exception—and it is one intimately bound up with the intrinsic purposiveness of an organization. It does not leave open the question as to the ulterior end for which the nature so organized must have existed, and yet it lies in the extrinsic relation of a means to an end. This is the organization of the two sexes in their mutual relation with a view to the propagation of their species. For here we may always ask, just as in the case of an individual: Why was it necessary for such a pair to exist? The answer is: In this pair we have what first forms an organizing whole, though not an organized whole in a single body.
Now when it is asked to what end a thing exists, the answer may take one or other of two forms. It may be said that its existence and generation have no relation whatever to a cause acting designedly. Its origin is then always understood to be derived from the mechanism of nature. Or it may be said that its existence, being that of a contingent natural entity, has some ground or other involving design. And this is a thought which it is difficult for us to separate from the concept of a thing that is organized. For inasmuch as we are compelled to rest its intrinsic possibility on the causality of final causes and an idea underlying this causality, we cannot but think that the real existence of this product is also an end. For where the representation of an effect is at the same time the ground determining an intelligent efficient cause to its production, the effect so represented is termed an end. Here, therefore, we may either say that the end of the real existence of a natural being of this kind is inherent in itself, that is, that it is not merely an end, but also a final end; or we may say that the final end lies outside it in other natural beings, that is, that its real existence, which is adapted to ends, is not itself a final end, but is necessitated by its being at the same time a means.	426
But if we go through the whole of nature we do not find in it, as nature, any being capable of laying claim to the distinction of being the final end of creation. In fact it may even be proved a priori, that what might do perhaps as an ultimate end for nature, endowing it with any conceivable qualities or properties we choose, could nevertheless in its character of a natural thing never be a final end.
Looking to the vegetable kingdom we might at first be induced by the boundless fertility with which it spreads itself abroad upon almost every soil to think that it should be regarded as a mere product of the mechanism which nature displays in its formations in the mineral kingdom. But a more intimate knowledge of its indescribably wise organization precludes us from entertaining this view, and drives us to ask: For what purpose do these forms of life exist? Suppose we reply: For the animal kingdom, which is thus provided with the means of sustenance, so that it has been enabled to spread over the face of the earth in such a manifold variety of genera. The question again arises: For what purpose then do these herbivores exist? The answer would be something like this: For the carnivores, which are only able to live on what itself has animal life. At last we come down to the question: What is the end and purpose of these and all the preceding natural kingdoms? For man, we say, and the multifarious uses to which his intelligence teaches him to put all these forms of life. He is the ultimate end of creation here upon earth, because he is the one and only being upon it that is able to form a concept of ends, and from an aggregate of things purposively fashioned to construct by the aid of his reason a system of ends.	427
We might also follow the chevalier Linné* and take the seemingly opposite course. Thus we might say: The herbivorous animals exist for the purpose of checking the profuse growth of the vegetable kingdom by which many species of that kingdom would be choked; the carnivores for the purpose of setting bounds to the voracity of the herbivores; and finally man exists so that by pursuing the latter and reducing their numbers a certain equilibrium between the productive and destructive forces of nature may be established. So, on this view, however much man might in a certain relation be judged as end, in a different relation he would in turn only rank as a means.
If we adopt the principle of an objective purposiveness in the manifold variety of the specific forms of terrestrial life and in their extrinsic relations to one another as beings with a structure adapted to ends, it is only rational to go on and imagine that in this extrinsic relation there is also a certain organization and a system of the whole kingdom of nature following final causes. But experience seems here to give the lie to the maxim of reason, more especially as regards an ultimate end of nature—an end which nevertheless is necessary to the possibility of such a system, and which we can only place in man. For, so far from making man, regarded as one of the many animal species, an ultimate end, nature has no more exempted him from its destructive than from its productive forces, nor has it made the smallest exception to its subjection of everything to a mechanism of forces devoid of an end.
The first thing that would have to be expressly appointed in a system ordered with a view to a purposive whole of natural beings upon the earth would be their habitat—the soil or the element upon or in which they are intended to thrive. But a more intimate knowledge of the nature of this basic condition of all organic production shows no trace of any causes but those acting altogether without design, and in fact tending towards destruction rather than calculated to promote genesis of forms, order, and ends. Land and sea not only contain memorials of mighty primeval disasters that have overtaken both them and all their living forms, but their entire structure—the strata of the land and the coastlines of the sea—has all the appearance of being the outcome of the wild and all-subduing forces of a nature working in a state of chaos. However wisely the configuration, elevation and slope of the land may now seem to be adapted for the reception of water from the air, for the subterranean channels of the springs that well up between the diverse layers of earth (suitable for various products) and for the course of the rivers, yet a closer investigation of them shows that they have resulted simply as the effect partly of volcanic eruptions, partly of floods, or even of invasions of the ocean. And this is not only true as regards the genesis of this configuration, but more particularly of its subsequent transformation, attended with the disappearance of its primitive organic productions.2 If now the abode for all these forms of life—the lap of the land and the bosom of the deep—points to none but a wholly undesigned mechanical generation, how can we, or what right have we to ask for or to maintain a different origin for these latter products? And even if man, as the most minute examination of the remains of those devastations of nature seems, in Camper’s judgement,* to prove, was not caught up in such revolutions, yet his dependence upon the remaining forms of terrestrial life is such that, if a mechanism of nature whose power overrides these others is admitted, he must be regarded as included within its scope, although his intelligence, to a large extent at least, has been able to save him from its work of destruction.	428
But this argument seems to go beyond what it was intended to prove. For it would seem to show not merely that man could not be an ultimate end of nature or, for the same reason, the aggregate of the organized things of terrestrial nature be a system of ends, but that even the products of nature previously deemed to be natural ends could have no other origin than the mechanism of nature.
But, then, we must bear in mind the results of the solution above given of the antinomy of the principles of the mechanical and teleological generation of organic natural beings. These principles, as we there saw, are merely principles of reflective judgement in respect of formative nature and its particular laws, the key to whose systematic correlation is not in our possession. They tell us nothing definite as to the origin of the things in their own intrinsic nature. They only assert that by the constitution of our understanding and our reason we are unable to conceive the origin in the case of beings of this kind otherwise than in the light of final causes. The utmost persistence possible, even a boldness, is allowed us in our endeavours to explain them on mechanical lines. More than that, we are even summoned by reason to do so, albeit we know we can never succeed with such an explanation—not because there is an inherent inconsistency between the mechanical generation and an origin according to ends, but for subjective reasons involved in the particular type and limitations of our understanding. Lastly, we saw that the reconciliation of the two modes of representing the possibility of nature might easily lie in the supersensible principle of nature, both external and internal. For the mode of representation based on final causes is only a subjective condition of the exercise of our reason in cases where it is not seeking to know the proper judgement to form of objects arranged merely as phenomena, but is bent rather on referring these phenomena, principles and all, to their supersensible substrate, for the purpose of recognizing the possibility of certain laws of their unity, which are incapable of being represented by the mind otherwise than by means of ends (of which reason also possesses examples of the supersensuous type).	429
§ 83 The ultimate end of nature as a teleological system
WE have shown in the preceding section that, looking to principles of reason, there is ample ground—for reflective, though not of course for determining, judgement—for letting us judge man as not merely a natural end, such as all organized beings are, but as the being upon this earth who is the ultimate end of nature, and the one in relation to whom all other natural things constitute a system of ends. What now is the end in man, and the end which, as such, is intended to be promoted by means of his connexion with nature? If this end is something which must be found in man himself, it must either be of such a kind that man himself may be satisfied by means of nature and its beneficence, or else it is the aptitude and skill for all manner of ends for which he may employ nature both external and internal. The former end of nature would be the happiness of man, the latter his culture.	430
The conception of happiness is not one which man abstracts more or less from his instincts and so derives from the animality within him. It is, on the contrary, a mere idea of a state, and one to which he seeks to make his actual state of being adequate under purely empirical conditions—an impossible task. He projects this idea himself, and, thanks to his understanding and its complex relations with imagination and the senses, projects it in such different ways, and even alters his concept so often, that even if nature were a complete slave to his free power of choice, it would nevertheless be utterly unable to adopt any definite, universal and fixed law by which to accommodate itself to this fluctuating concept and so bring itself into accord with the end that each individual arbitrarily sets before himself. But even if we sought to reduce this concept to the level of the true wants of nature in which our species is in complete and fundamental accord, or, trying the other alternative, sought to increase to the highest level man’s skill in accomplishing his imagined ends, nevertheless what man means by happiness, and what in fact constitutes his peculiar ultimate natural end, as opposed to the end of freedom, would never be attained by him. For his own nature is not so constituted as to rest or be satisfied in any possession or enjoyment whatever. Then external nature is far from having made a particular favourite of man or from having preferred him to all other animals as the object of its beneficence. For we see that in its destructive operations—plague, famine, flood, cold, attacks from animals great and small, and all such things—it has as little spared him as any other animal. But, besides all this, the discord of inner natural tendencies betrays him into further misfortunes of his own invention, and reduces other members of his species, through the oppression of lordly power, the barbarism of wars, and the like, to such misery, while he himself does all he can to work destruction on his race, that, even with the utmost goodwill on the part of external nature, its end, supposing it were directed to the happiness of our species, would never be attained in a system of terrestrial nature, because our own nature is not capable of it. Man, therefore, is always but a link in the chain of natural ends. True, he is a principle in respect of many ends to which nature seems to have predetermined him, seeing that he makes himself so; but, nevertheless, he is also a means towards the preservation of the purposiveness in the mechanism of the remaining members. As the single being upon earth that possesses understanding, and, consequently, a capacity for setting before himself ends of his deliberate choice, he is certainly titular lord of nature, and, supposing we regard nature as a teleological system, he is born to be its ultimate end. But this is always on the terms that he has the intelligence and the will to give to it and to himself such a reference to ends as can be self-sufficing independently of nature, and, consequently, a final end. Such an end, however, must not be sought in nature.	431
But, where in man, at any rate, are we to place this ultimate end of nature? To discover this we must seek out what nature can supply for the purpose of preparing him for what he himself must do in order to be a final end, and we must segregate it from all ends whose possibility rests upon conditions that man can only await at the hand of nature. Earthly happiness is an end of the latter kind. It is understood to mean the sum of all possible human ends attainable through nature whether in man or external to him. In other words it is the material substance of all his earthly ends and what, if he converts it into his entire end, renders him incapable of positing a final end for his own existence and of harmonizing therewith. Therefore of all his ends in nature, we are left only with a formal, subjective condition, that, namely, of the aptitude for setting ends before himself at all, and, independent of nature in his power of determining ends, of employing nature as a means in accordance with the maxims of his free ends generally. This alone remains as what nature can effect relative to the final end that lies outside it, and as what may therefore be regarded as its ultimate end. The production in a rational being of an aptitude for any ends whatever of his own choosing, consequently of the aptitude of a being in his freedom, is culture. Hence it is only culture that can be the ultimate end which we have cause to attribute to nature in respect of the human race. His individual happiness on earth, and, we may say, the mere fact that he is the chief instrument for instituting order and harmony in non-rational external nature, are ruled out.
But not every form of culture can fill the office of this ultimate end of nature. Skill is a culture that is certainly the principal subjective condition of the aptitude for the furthering of ends of all kinds, yet it is incompetent for giving assistance to the will in its determination and choice of its ends. But this is an essential factor, if an aptitude for ends is to have its full meaning. This latter condition of aptitude, involving what might be called culture by way of training (discipline), is negative. It consists in the liberation of the will from the despotism of desires whereby, in our attachment to certain natural things, we are rendered incapable of exercising a choice of our own. This happens when we allow ourselves to be enchained by impulses with which nature only provided us that they might serve as guidance to prevent our neglecting, or even impairing, the animal element in our nature, while yet we are left free enough to tighten or slacken them, to lengthen or shorten them, as the ends of our reason demand.	432
Skill can hardly be developed in the human race otherwise than by means of inequality among human beings. For the majority, in a mechanical kind of way that calls for no special art, provide the necessities of life for the ease and convenience of others who apply themselves to the less necessary branches of culture in science and art. These keep the masses in a state of oppression, with hard work and little enjoyment, though in the course of time much of the culture of the higher classes spreads to them also. But with the advance of this culture—the culminating point of which, where devotion to what is superfluous begins to be prejudicial to what is indispensable, is called luxury—misfortunes increase equally on both sides. With the lower classes they arise by force of domination from without, with the upper from seeds of discontent within. Yet this splendid misery is connected with the development of natural tendencies in the human race, and the end pursued by nature itself, even if it is not our end, is thereby attained. The formal condition under which nature can alone attain this its real end is the existence of a constitution so regulating the mutual relations of men that the abuse of freedom by individuals striving one against another is opposed by a lawful authority centred in a whole, called a civil community. For it is only in such a constitution that the greatest development of natural tendencies can take place. In addition to this we should also need a cosmopolitan whole—had men but the ingenuity to discover such a constitution and the wisdom voluntarily to submit themselves to its constraint. It would be a system of all states that are in danger of acting injuriously to one another. In its absence, and with the obstacles that ambition, love of power, and avarice, especially on the part of those who hold the reins of authority, put in the way even of the possibility of such a scheme, war is inevitable. Sometimes this results in states splitting up and resolving themselves into lesser states, sometimes one state absorbs other smaller states and endeavours to build up a larger unit. But if on the part of men war is a thoughtless undertaking, being stirred up by unbridled passions, it is nevertheless a deep-seated, maybe far-seeing, attempt on the part of supreme wisdom, if not to found, yet to prepare the way for a rule of law governing the freedom of states, and thus bring about their unity in a system established on a moral basis. And, in spite of the terrible calamities which it inflicts on the human race, and the hardships, perhaps even greater, imposed by the constant preparation for it in time of peace, yet—as the prospect of the dawn of an abiding reign of national happiness keeps ever retreating farther into the distance—it is one further spur for developing to the highest pitch all talents that minister to culture.*	433
We turn now to the discipline of inclinations. In respect of these our natural capacities are very purposively adapted to the performance of our essential functions as an animal species, but the inclinations are a great impediment to the development of our humanity. Yet here again, in respect of this second requisite for culture, we see nature striving on purposive lines to give us that education that renders us receptive to higher ends than it can itself afford. The preponderance of evil which a taste refined to the extreme of idealization, and which even luxury in the sciences, considered as food for vanity, diffuses among us as the result of the crowd of insatiable inclinations which they beget, is indisputable. But, while that is so, we cannot fail to recognize the end of nature—ever more and more to prevail over the rudeness and violence of inclinations that belong more to the animal part of our nature and are most inimical to education that would fit us for our higher vocation (inclinations towards enjoyment), and to make way for the development of our humanity. Fine art and the sciences, if they do not make man morally better, yet, by conveying a pleasure that admits of universal communication and by introducing polish and refinement into society, make him civilized. Thus they do much to overcome the tyrannical propensities of the senses, and so prepare man for a sovereignty in which reason alone shall have sway. Meanwhile the evils visited upon us, now by nature, now by the truculent egoism of man, evoke the energies of the soul, and give it strength and courage to submit to no such force, and at the same time allow us to sense that in the depths of our nature there is an aptitude for higher ends.3	434
§ 84 The final end of the existence of a world, that is, of creation itself
A final end is an end that does not require any other end as condition of its possibility.
If the simple mechanism of nature is accepted as the explanation of its purposiveness, it is not open to us to ask: For what end do the things in the world exist? For on such an idealistic system we have only to reckon with the physical possibility of things,—and things that it would be mere sophistry to imagine as ends. Whether we refer this form of things to chance, or whether we refer it to blind necessity, such a question would in either case be meaningless. But if we suppose the purposive nexus in the world to be real, and assume a special type of causality for it, namely the activity of a cause acting designedly, we cannot then stop short at the question: What is the end for which things in the world, namely organized beings, possess this or that form, or are placed by nature in this or that relation to other things? On the contrary, once we have conceived an understanding that must be regarded as the cause of the possibility of such forms as they are actually found in things, we must go on and seek in this understanding for an objective ground capable of determining such productive understanding to the production of an effect of this kind. That ground is then the final end for which such things exist.	435
I have said above that the final end is not an end which nature would be competent to realize or produce in terms of its idea, because it is one that is unconditioned. For in nature, as a thing of the senses, there is nothing whose determining ground, discoverable in nature itself, is not always in turn conditioned. This is not merely true of external or material nature, but also of our internal or thinking nature—it being of course understood that I am only considering what in us is strictly nature. But a thing which by virtue of its objective characterization is to exist necessarily as the final end of an intelligent cause, must be of such a kind that in the order of ends it is dependent upon no further or other condition than simply its idea.
Now we find in the world beings of only one kind whose causality is teleological, or directed to ends, and which at the same time are beings of such a character that the law according to which they have to determine ends for themselves is represented by them themselves as unconditioned and not dependent on anything in nature, but as necessary in itself. The being of this kind is man, but man regarded as noumenon. He is the only natural creature whose peculiar objective characterization is nevertheless such as to enable us to recognize in him a supersensible faculty—his freedom—and to perceive both the law of the causality and the object of freedom which that faculty is able to set before itself as the highest end—the highest good in the world.
Now it is not open to us in the case of man, considered as a moral agent, or similarly in the case of any rational being in the world, to ask the further question: For what end (quem in finem) does he exist? His existence inherently involves the highest end—the end to which, as far as in him lies, he may subject the whole of nature, or against which at least he must not deem himself subjected to any influence on its part.—Now assuming that things in the world are beings that are dependent in point of their real existence, and, as such, stand in need of a supreme cause acting according to ends, then man is the final end of creation. For without man the chain of mutually subordinated ends would have no ultimate point of reference. Only in man, and only in him as the individual being to whom the moral law applies, do we find unconditional legislation in respect of ends. This legislation, therefore, is what alone qualifies him to be a final end to which entire nature is teleologically subordinated.4	436
§ 85 Physico-Theology
Physico-Theology is the attempt* on the part of reason to infer the supreme cause of nature and its attributes from the ends of nature—ends which can only be known empirically. A moral theology, or ethicotheology, would be the attempt to infer that cause and its attributes from the moral end of rational beings in nature—an end which can be known a priori.
The former naturally precedes the latter. For if we seek to infer a world-cause from the things in the world by teleological arguments, we must first of all be given ends of nature. Then for these ends so given we must afterwards look for a final end, and this final end obliges us to seek the principle of the causality of the supreme cause in question.	437
Much natural research can, and indeed must, be conducted in the light of the teleological principle without our having occasion to inquire into the source of the possibility of the purposive activity which we meet with in various products of nature. But should we now desire to form also a concept of this source, we are then in the position of having absolutely no available insight that can penetrate beyond our mere maxim of reflective judgement. According to this maxim, given but a single organized product of nature, then the structure of our cognitive faculty is such that the only source which we can conceive it to have is one that is a cause of nature itself—whether of nature as a whole or even only of this particular portion of it—and that derives from an understanding the requisite causality for such a product. This is a critical principle which doubtless brings us no whit farther in the explanation of natural things or their origin. Yet it discloses to our view a prospect that extends beyond the horizon of nature and points to our being able perhaps to determine more closely the concept of an original being that otherwise appears so unfruitful.
Now I say that no matter how far physico-teleology may be pushed, it can never disclose to us anything about a final end of creation; for it never even begins to look for a final end. Thus it can justify, no doubt, the concept of an intelligent world-cause as a concept which subjectively—that is in relation to the nature of our cognitive faculty alone—is effective to explain the possibility of things that we can render intelligible to ourselves in the light of ends. But neither from a theoretical nor a practical point of view can it determine this concept any further. Its attempt falls short of its proposed aim of affording a basis of theology. To the last it remains nothing but a physical teleology: for the purposive connection which it recognizes is only, and must only, be regarded as subject to natural conditions. Consequently it can never institute an inquiry into the end for which nature itself exists—this being an end whose source must be sought outside nature. Yet it is upon the definite idea of this end that the definite conception of such a supreme intelligent world-cause, and, consequently, the possibility of a theology, depend.
Of what use are the things in the world to one another? What good is the manifold in a thing to this thing? How are we entitled to assume that nothing in the world is in vain, but that, provided we grant that certain things, regarded as ends, ought to exist, everything serves some purpose or other in nature? All these questions imply that in respect of our judgement reason has at its command no other principle of the possibility of the object which it is obliged to judge teleologically than that of subordinating the mechanism of nature to the architectonic of an intelligent author of the world; and directed to all these issues the teleological survey of the world plays its part nobly and fills us with intense admiration. But inasmuch as the data, and, consequently, the principles, for determining such a concept of an intelligent world-cause, regarded as the supreme artist, are merely empirical, they do not allow us to infer any other attributes belonging to it than those which experience reveals to us as manifested in its effects. But as experience is unable to embrace the whole of nature as a system, it must frequently find support for arguments which, to all appearances, conflict with that concept and with one another. Yet it can never lift us above nature to the end of its real existence or thus raise us to a definite concept of such a higher intelligence—even if it were in our power empirically to survey the entire system considered as mere nature.	438
If the problem which physico-theology has to solve is set to a lower key, then its solution seems an easy matter.* Thus we may think of an intelligent being possessing a number of superlative attributes, without the full complement of those necessary for establishing a nature harmonizing with the greatest possible end, and to all beings of this description—of whom there may be one or more—we might be extravagant enough to apply the concept of a Deity. Or, if we let it pass as of no importance to supplement by arbitrary additions the proofs of a theory where the grounds of proof are deficient; and if, therefore, where we have only reason to assume much perfection (and what, then, is much for us?) we deem ourselves entitled to take all possible perfection for granted:—then physical teleology has important claims to the distinction of affording the basis of a theology. But what is there to lead, and, more than that, authorize us to supplement the facts of the case in this way? If we are called on to point out what it is, we shall seek in vain for any ground of justification in the principles of the theoretical employment of reason. For such employment emphatically demands that for the purpose of explaining an object of experience we are not to ascribe to it more attributes than we find in the empirical data for the possibility of the object. On closer investigation we should see that underlying our procedure is an idea of a Supreme Being, which rests on an entirely different employment of reason, namely its practical employment, and that it is this idea, which exists in us a priori, that impels us to supplement the defective representation of an original ground of the ends in nature afforded by physical teleology, and enlarge it to the concept of a Deity. When we saw this, we should not erroneously imagine that we had evolved this idea, and, with it, a theology by means of the theoretical employment of reason in the physical cognition of the world—much less that we had proved its reality.	439
One cannot blame the ancients so very much for imagining that, while there was great diversity among their gods, both in respect of their power and of their purposes and dispositions, they were all, not excepting the sovereign head of the gods himself, invariably limited in human fashion. For on surveying the order and course of the things in nature they certainly found ample reason for assuming something more than mere mechanism as its cause and for conjecturing the existence of purposes on the part of certain higher causes, which they could only conceive to be superhuman, behind the machinery of this world. But, since they encountered both the good and evil, the purposive and the counter-purposive, very much interspersed, at least to human eyes, and could not take the liberty of assuming, for the sake of the arbitrary idea of an all-perfect author, that there were nevertheless mysteriously wise and beneficent ends, of which they did not see the evidence, underlying all this apparent antagonism, their judgement on the supreme world-cause could hardly be other than it was, so long, that is, as they followed maxims of the mere theoretical employment of reason with strict consistency. Others who were physicists* and in that character desired to be theologians also, thought that they would give full satisfaction to reason by providing for the absolute unity of the principle of natural things, which reason demands, by means of the idea of a being in which, as sole substance, the whole assemblage of those natural things would be contained only as inhering modes. While this substance would not be the cause of the world by virtue of its intelligence, it would nevertheless be a subject in which all the intelligence on the part of the beings in the world would reside. Hence, although it would not be a being that produced anything according to ends, it would be one in which all things—owing to the unity of the subject of which they are mere determinations—must necessarily be interconnected in a purposive manner, though independently of any end or design. Thus they introduced the idealism of final causes, by converting the unity, so difficult to deduce, of a number of substances standing in a purposive connexion, from a causal dependence on one substance into the unity of inherence in one. Looked at from the side of the beings that inhere, this system became pantheism, and from the side of the sole subsisting subject, as original being, it became, by a later development, Spinozism. Thus in the end, instead of solving the problem of the primary source of the purposiveness of nature, it regarded the whole question as idle, for the conception of such purposiveness, being shorn of all reality, was reduced to a simple misinterpretation of the universal ontological conception of a thing in the abstract.	440
So we see that the conception of a Deity, such as would meet the demands of our teleological judging of nature, can never be developed according to mere theoretical principles of the employment of reason—and these are the only principles upon which physico-theology relies. For, suppose we assert that all teleology is a delusion on the part of the power of judgement in its judging of the causal nexus of things and take refuge in the sole principle of a mere mechanism of nature. Then nature only appears to us to involve a universal relation to ends, owing to the unity of the substance that contains it as no more than the multiplicity of its modes. Or, suppose that instead of adopting this idealism of final causes, we wish to adhere to the principle of the realism of this particular type of causality. Then—no matter whether we base natural ends on a number of intelligent original beings or on a single one—the moment we find ourselves with nothing upon which to ground the conception of realism but empirical principles drawn from the actual nexus of ends in the world, on the one hand we cannot help accepting the fact of the discordance with purposive unity of which nature presents many examples, and on the other hand, we can never obtain a sufficiently determinate concept of a single intelligent cause—so long as we keep to what mere experience entitles us to extract—to satisfy any sort of theology whatever which will be of use theoretically or practically.
It is true that physical teleology urges us to go in quest of a theology. But it cannot produce one—however far we carry our investigations of nature, or help out the nexus of ends discovered in it with ideas of reason (which for physical problems must be theoretical). We may pose the reasonable question: What is the use of our basing all these arrangements on a great, and for us unfathomable, intelligence, and supposing it to order this world according to its intentions, if nature does not and cannot ever tell us anything as to the final aim in view? For apart from a final purpose we are unable to relate all these natural ends to a common point of reference, or form an adequate teleological principle, be it for combining all the ends in a known system, or be it for framing such a conception of the supreme Intelligence, as cause of a nature like this, as could act as a standard for our judgement in its teleological reflection upon nature. I should have, it is true, in that case an artistic intelligence for miscellaneous ends, but no wisdom for a final end, which nevertheless is what must, properly speaking, contain the ground by which such intelligence is determined. I require a final end, and it is only pure reason that can supply this a priori for all ends in the world are empirically conditioned and can contain nothing that is absolutely good, but only what is good for this or that purpose regarded as contingent. Such a final end alone would instruct me how I am to conceive the supreme cause of nature—what attributes I am to assign to it, and in what degree, and how I am to conceive its relation to nature—if I am to judge nature as a teleological system. In the absence, then, of a final end, what liberty or what authority have I to extend at will such a very limited concept of that original intelligence as I can base on my own poor knowledge of the world, or my concept of the power of this original being to realize its ideas, or of its will to do so, and so forth, and expand it to the idea of an all-wise and infinite being? Were I able to do this theoretically it would presuppose omniscience in myself to enable me to see into the ends of nature in their entire context, and in addition to conceive all other possible schemes, as compared with which the present would have to be judged on reasonable grounds to be the best. For without this perfected knowledge of the effect, my reasoning can arrive at no definite concept of the supreme cause—which is only to be found in that of an intelligence in every respect infinite, that is, in the concept of a Deity—or establish a basis for theology.	441
Hence, allowing for all possible extension of physical teleology, we may keep to the principle set out above and say that the constitution and principles of our cognitive faculty are such that we can only conceive nature, in respect of those of its arrangements that are familiar to us and display purposiveness, as the product of an intelligence to which it is subjected. But whether this intelligence may also have had a final purpose in view in the production of nature and in its constitution as a whole, which final purpose in that case would not reside in nature as the sensible world, is a matter that the theoretical study of nature can never disclose. On the contrary, however great our knowledge of nature, it remains an open question whether that supreme cause is the original source of nature as a cause acting throughout according to a final end, or whether it is not rather such a source by virtue of an intelligence that is determined by the simple necessity of its nature to the production of certain forms (by analogy to what we call the artistic instinct in animals). The latter version does not involve our ascribing even wisdom to such intelligence, much less wisdom that is supreme and conjoined with all other properties requisite for ensuring the perfection of its product.	442
Hence physico-theology is a misconceived physical teleology. It is of no use to theology except as a preparation or propaedentic, and is only sufficient for this purpose when supplemented by a further principle on which it can rely. But it is not, as its name would suggest, sufficient, even as a propaedentic, if taken by itself.
§ 86 Ethico-Theology
THERE is a judgement which even the commonest understanding finds irresistible when it reflects upon the existence of the things in the world and the existence of the world itself. It is the verdict that all the manifold forms of life, co-ordinated though they may be with the greatest art and concatenated with the utmost variety of purposive adaptations, and even the entire complex that embraces their numerous systems, incorrectly called worlds, would all exist for nothing, if man, or rational beings of some sort, were not to be found in their midst. Without man, in other words, the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final end. Yet it is not man’s cognitive faculty, that is, theoretical reason, that forms the point of reference which alone gives its worth to the existence of all else in the world—as if the meaning of his presence in the world was that there might be someone in it that could make it an object of contemplation. For if this contemplation of the world brought to light nothing but things without a final end, the existence of the world could not acquire a worth from the fact of its being known. A final end of the world must be presupposed as that in relation to which the contemplation of the world may itself possess a worth. Neither is it in relation to the feeling of pleasure or the sum of such feelings that we can think that there is a given final end of creation, that is to say, it is not by well-being, not by enjoyment, whether bodily or mental, not, in a word, by happiness, that we value that absolute worth. For the fact that man, when he does exist, makes happiness his own final purpose, affords us no conception of any reason why he should exist at all, or of any worth he himself possesses, for which his existence should be made agreeable to him. Hence man must already be presupposed to be the final end of creation, in order that we may have a rational ground to explain why nature, when regarded as an absolute whole according to principles of ends, must be in accord with the conditions of his happiness.—Accordingly it is only the faculty of desire that can give the required point of reference—yet not that faculty which makes man dependent upon nature (through sensuous impulses), that is, not that in respect of which the worth of his existence is dependent upon what he receives and enjoys. On the contrary it is the worth which he alone can give to himself, and which consists in what he does—in the manner in which and the principles upon which he acts in the freedom of his faculty of desire, and not as a link in the chain of nature. In other words a good will is that whereby man’s existence can alone possess an absolute worth, and in relation to which the existence of the world can have a final end.	443
Even the popular verdict of sound human reason, once its reflection is directed to this question and pressed to consider it, is in complete accord with the judgement that it is only as a moral being that man can be a final end of creation. What, it will be said, does it all avail, that this man has so much talent, that he is even so active in its employment and thus exerts a useful influence upon social and public life, and that he possesses, therefore, considerable worth alike in relation to his own state of happiness and in relation to what is good for others, if he has not a good will? Looked at from the point of view of his inner self, he is a contemptible object; and, if creation is not to be altogether devoid of a final end, such a man, though as man he is part of creation, must nevertheless, as a bad man dwelling in a world subject to moral laws, forfeit, in accordance with those laws, his own subjective end, that is happiness, as the sole condition under which his existence can cohere with the final end.
Now if we find instances in the world of an order adapted to ends, and if, as reason inevitably requires, we subordinate the ends which are only conditionally ends, to one that is unconditioned and supreme, that is to a final end, we readily see, to begin with, that we are then not dealing with an end of nature, included within nature taken as existent, but with the end of the existence of nature itself, with all its orderly adaptations included. Consequently we see the question is one of the ultimate end of creation, and, more precisely, of the supreme condition under which alone there can be a final end, or, in other words, of the ground that determines a highest intelligence to the production of the beings in the world.
It is, then, only as a moral being that we acknowledge man to be the end of creation. Hence we have, first of all, a reason, or at least the primary condition, for regarding the world as a consistent whole of interconnected ends, and as a system of final causes. Now the structure of our reason is such that we necessarily refer natural ends to an intelligent world-cause. Above all, then, we have one principle applicable to this relation, enabling us to think the nature and attributes of this first cause considered as supreme ground in the kingdom of ends, and to form a definite concept of it. This is what could not be done by physical teleology, which was only able to suggest vague concepts of such a ground—concepts which this vagueness made as useless for practical as for theoretical employment.	444
With such a definite principle as this, of the causality of the original being, we shall not have to regard it merely as an intelligence and as legislating for nature, but as the sovereign head legislating in a moral kingdom of ends. In relation to the highest good, which is alone possible under his sovereignty, namely the existence of rational beings under moral laws, we shall conceive this original being to be omniscient, so that even our inmost dispositions—wherein lies the distinctive moral worth in the actions of rational beings in the world—may not be hid from him. We shall conceive him as omnipotent, so that he may be able to adapt entire nature to this highest end; as both all-good and just, since these two attributes, which unite to form wisdom, constitute the conditions under which a supreme cause of the world can be the source of the greatest good under moral laws. Similarly the other remaining transcendental attributes, such as eternity, omnipresence, and so forth (for goodness and justice are moral attributes), all attributes that are presupposed in relation to such a final end, will have to be regarded as belonging to this original being.—In this way moral teleology supplements the deficiency of physical teleology, and for the first time establishes a theology. For physical teleology, if it is not to borrow secretly from moral teleology, but is to proceed with strict logical rigour, can from its own unaided resources establish nothing but a demonology, which does not admit of any definite concept.
But the principle which, because of the moral and teleological significance of certain beings in the world, refers the world to a supreme cause as Deity, does not establish this relation by being simply a completion of the physico-teleological argument, and therefore by adopting this necessarily as its foundation. On the contrary it can rely on its own resources, and urges attention to the ends of nature and inquiry after the incomprehensibly great art that lies hidden behind its forms, so as to give to the ideas produced by pure practical reason an incidental confirmation in natural ends. For the conception of beings of the world subject to moral laws is an a priori principle upon which man must necessarily judge himself. Furthermore, if there is a world-cause acting designedly and directed to an end, the moral relation above mentioned must just as necessarily be the condition of the possibility of a creation as is the relation determined by physical laws—that is, supposing that such an intelligent cause has also a final end. This is a principle which reason regards even a priori as one that is necessary for its teleological judging of the existence of things. The whole question, then, is reduced to this: Have we any ground capable of satisfying reason, speculative or practical, to justify our attributing a final end to the supreme cause that acts according to ends? For that, judging by the subjective character of our reason, or even by anything we can at all imagine of the reason of other beings, such final end could be nothing but man as subject to moral laws, may be taken a priori as a matter of certainty; whereas we are wholly unable to cognize a priori what are the ends of nature in the physical order, and above all it is impossible to see that a nature could not exist apart from such ends.	445
Remark
Imagine a person at the moment when his mind is disposed to moral feeling! If, amid beautiful natural surroundings, he is in calm and serene enjoyment of his existence, he feels within him a need—a need of being grateful for it to someone. Or, at another time, in the same frame of mind, he may find himself in the stress of duties which he can only perform and will perform by submitting to a voluntary sacrifice; then he feels within him a need—a need of having, in so doing, carried out something commanded of him and obeyed a Supreme Lord. Or he may in some thoughtless manner have diverged from the path of duty, though not so as to have made himself answerable to others; yet words of stern self-reproach will then fall upon an inward ear, and he will seem to hear the voice of a judge to whom he has to render account. In a word, he needs a moral Intelligence; because he exists for an end, and this end demands a Being as the cause both of himself and the world with that end in view. It is waste of labour to go burrowing behind these feelings for motives; for they are immediately connected with the purest moral disposition: gratitude, obedience, and humiliation— that is, submission before a deserved chastisement—being special modes of the mind’s attunement to duty. It is merely that the mind inclined to give expansion to its moral disposition here voluntarily imagines an object that is not in the world, in order, if possible, to prove its dutifulness before such an object also. Hence it is at least possible—and, besides, there is in our moral habits of thought a foundation for so doing—to form a representation of a pure moral need for the existence of a being, whereby our morality gains in strength or even obtains—at least on the side of our representation—an extension of area, that is to say, is given a new object for its exercise. In other words, it is possible to admit a moral legislator existing apart from the world, and to do so without regard to theoretical proof, and still less to self-interest, but on a purely moral ground, which, while of course only subjective, is free from all foreign influence, on the mere recommendation of a pure practical reason that legislates for itself alone. It may be that such a disposition of the mind is but a rare occurrence, or, again, does not last long, but rather is fleeting and of no permanent effect, or, it may be, passes away without the mind bestowing a single thought upon such a shadowy image, and without troubling to reduce it to clear concepts. Yet the source of this disposition is unmistakable. It is the original moral predisposition of our nature, as a subjective principle, that will not let us be satisfied, in our consideration of the world, with the purposiveness which it derives through natural causes, but leads us to introduce into it an underlying supreme cause governing nature according to moral laws.—In addition to the above there is the fact that we feel ourselves urged by the moral law to strive after a universal highest end, while yet we feel ourselves, and all nature too, incapable of its attainment. Further, it is only so far as we strive after this end that we can judge ourselves to be in harmony with the final end of an intelligent world-cause—if such there be. Thus we have a pure moral ground derived from practical reason for admitting this cause (since we may do so without self-contradiction), if for no better reason, in order that we may not run the risk of regarding such striving as quite idle in its effects, and of allowing it to flag in consequence.	446
Let us restate what we intended to convey here by all these observations. While fear doubtless in the first instance may have been able to produce gods, that is demons, it is only reason by its moral principles that has been able to produce the concept of God—and it has been able to do so despite the great ignorance that has usually prevailed in what concerns the teleology of nature, or the considerable doubt that arises from the difficulty of reconciling by a sufficiently established principle the mutually conflicting phenomena that nature presents. Further, the inner moral destination of man’s existence supplements the shortcomings of natural knowledge, by directing us to join to the thought of the final end of the existence of all things—an end the principle of which only satisfies reason from an ethical point of view—the thought of the supreme cause as endowed with attributes whereby it is empowered to subject the whole of nature to that single purpose, and make it merely instrumental thereto. In other words it directs us to think the supreme cause as a Deity.	447
§ 87 The moral proof of the existence of God
WE have a physical teleology that affords evidence sufficient for our theoretical reflective judgement to enable us to admit the existence of an intelligent world-cause. But in ourselves, and still more in the general concept of a rational being endowed with freedom of its causality, we find a moral teleology. But as our own relation to an end, together with the law governing it, may be determined a priori, and consequently cognized as necessary, moral teleology does not stand in need of any intelligent cause outside ourselves to explain this intrinsic conformity to law any more than what we consider purposive in the geometrical properties of figures (their adaptation for all possible kinds of employment by art) lets us look beyond to a supreme understanding that imparts this purposiveness to them. But this moral teleology deals with us for all that as beings of the world and, therefore, as beings associated with other things in the world; and the same moral laws enjoin us to turn our consideration to these other things in the world, regarded either as ends, or as objects in respect of which we ourselves are the final end. This moral teleology, then, which deals with the relation of our own causality to ends, or even to a final end that must be proposed by us in the world, as well as with the reciprocal relation subsisting between the world and that moral end and the possibility of realizing it under external conditions—a matter upon which no physical teleology can give us any guidance—raises a necessary question. For we must ask: Does this moral teleology oblige our rational judgement to go beyond the world and seek for an intelligent supreme principle in respect of the relation of nature to the moral side of our being, so that we may form a representation of nature as displaying purposiveness in relation also to our inner moral legislation and its possible realization? Hence there is certainly a moral teleology. It is as necessarily implicated with the nomothetic of freedom on the one hand, and that of nature on the other, as with civil legislation is implicated the question of where the executive authority is to be sought. In fact there is here the same implication as is to be found in everything in which reason has to assign a principle of the actuality of a certain uniform order of things that is only possible according to ideas.—We shall begin by exhibiting how from the above moral teleology and its relation to physical teleology reason advances to theology. Having done so, we shall make some observations on the possibility and conclusiveness of this mode of reasoning.	448
If we assume the existence of certain things, or even only of certain forms of things, to be contingent, and consequently to be only possible by means of something else as their cause, we may then look for the supreme source of this causality, and, therefore, for the unconditioned ground of the conditioned, either in the physical or the teleological order—that is, we may look either to the nexus effectivus or to the nexus finalis. In other words, we may ask which is the supreme productive cause, or we may ask what is the supreme or absolutely unconditioned end of such a cause, that is, what in general is the final end for which it produces these or all its products. In the latter question it is obviously taken for granted that this cause can form a representation of the end, and is consequently an intelligent being, or at least that it must be conceived by us as acting according to the laws of such a being.
Now, supposing we follow the teleological order, there is a fundamental principle to which even the most ordinary human intelligence is obliged to give immediate assent. It is the principle that if there is to be a final end at all, which reason must assign a priori, then it can only be man—or any rational being in the world—standing under moral laws.5 For—and this is the verdict of everyone—if the world only consisted of lifeless beings, or even consisted partly of living, but yet non-rational beings, the existence of such a world would have no worth whatever, because there would exist in it no being with the least conception of what worth is. On the other hand, if there were even rational beings, and if nevertheless their reason were only able to set the worth of the existence of things in the bearing which nature has upon them, that is, in their well-being, instead of being able to procure such a worth for themselves from original sources, that is, in their freedom, then there would be, it is true, relative ends in the world, but no absolute end, since the existence of rational beings of this kind would still always remain devoid of an end. It is, however, a distinctive feature of the moral laws that they prescribe something for reason in the form of an end apart from any condition, and consequently in the very form that the concept of a final end requires. Therefore the existence of a reason like this, that in the order of ends can be the supreme law to itself, in other words the real existence of rational beings subject to moral laws, can alone be regarded as the final end of the existence of a world. But if this is not so, then either no end whatever in the cause underlies the existence of the world or else only ends without a final end.	449 450
The moral law is the formal rational condition of the employment of our freedom, and, as such, of itself alone lays its obligation upon us, independently of any end as its material condition. But it also defines for us a final end, and does so a priori, and makes it obligatory upon us to strive towards its attainment. This end is the highest good in the world possible through freedom.
The subjective condition under which man, and, as far as we can at all conceive, every rational finite being also, is able under the above law to set before himself a final end, is happiness. Consequently the highest possible physical good in the world, and the one to be furthered so far as in us lies as the final end, is happiness—subject to the objective condition that the individual harmonizes with the law of morality, regarded as worthiness to be happy.
But by no faculty of our reason can we represent to ourselves these two requisites for the final end proposed to us by the moral law to be connected by means of mere natural causes and also conformed to the idea of the final end in contemplation. Accordingly, if we do not bring the causality of any other means besides nature into alliance with our freedom, the concept of the practical necessity of such an end through the application of our powers does not accord with the theoretical concept of the physical possibility of its realization.
Consequently we must assume a moral world-cause, that is, an author of the world, if we are to set before ourselves a final end in conformity with the requirements of the moral law. And as far as it is necessary to set such an end before us, so far, that is in the same degree and upon the same ground, it is necessary to assume an author of the world, or, in other words, that there is a God.6
This proof, to which we may easily give the form of logical precision, does not imply that it is as necessary to assume the existence of God as it is to recognize the validity of the moral law, and that, consequently, one who is unable to convince himself of the former may deem himself absolved from the obligations imposed by the latter. No! all that must be abandoned in that case is the aim of realizing the final end in the world by the pursuit of the moral law (the happiness of rational beings harmoniously associated with such pursuit, as the highest good in the world). Every rational being would still have to continue to recognize himself as firmly bound by the precept of morality, for its laws are formal and command unconditionally, paying no regard to ends (as the material content of the will). But the one requirement of the final end, as prescribed by practical reason to the beings of the world, is an irresistible end planted in them by their nature as finite beings. Reason refuses to countenance this end except as subject to the moral law as inviolable condition, and would only have it made universal in accordance with this condition. Thus it makes the furtherance of happiness in agreement with morality the final end. To promote this end—so far, in respect of happiness, as lies in our power—is commanded us by the moral law, whatever the outcome of this endeavour may be. The fulfilment of duty consists in the form of the earnest will, not in the intervening causes that contribute to success.	451
Suppose, then, that an individual, influenced partly by the weakness of all the speculative arguments that are thought so much of, and partly by the number of irregularities he finds in nature and the moral world, becomes persuaded of the proposition: There is no God; nevertheless in his own eyes he would be a worthless creature if he chose on that account to regard the laws of duty as simply fanciful, invalid, and non-obligatory, and resolved boldly to transgress them. Again, let us suppose that such a man were able subsequently to convince himself of the truth of what he had at first doubted; he would still remain worthless if he held to the above way of thinking. This is so, were he even to fulfil his duty as punctiliously as could be desired, so far as actual actions are concerned, but were to do so from fear or with a view to reward, and without an inward reverence for duty. Conversely, if, as a believer in God, he observes his duty according to his conscience, uprightly and disinterestedly, yet if whenever, to try himself, he puts before himself the case of his haply being able to convince himself that there is no God, he straight away believes himself free from all moral obligation, the state of his inner moral disposition could then only be bad.	452
Let us then, as we may, take the case of a righteous man, such, say, as Spinoza, who considers himself firmly persuaded that there is no God and—since in respect of the object of morality a similar result ensues—no future life either. How will he judge his individual intrinsic purposiveness that is derived from the moral law which he reveres in practice? He does not require that its pursuit should bring him any personal benefit either in this or any other world. On the contrary his will is disinterestedly to establish only that good to which the holy law directs all his energies. But he is circumscribed in his endeavour. He may, it is true, expect to find a chance concurrence now and again, but he can never expect to find in nature a uniform agreement—a consistent agreement according to fixed rules, answering to what his maxims are and must be subjectively, with that end which yet he feels himself obliged and urged to realize. Deceit, violence, and envy will always be rife around him, although he himself is honest, peaceable, and benevolent; and the other righteous individuals that he meets in the world, no matter how deserving they may be of happiness, will be subjected by nature, which takes no heed of such deserts, to all the evils of want, disease, and untimely death, just as are the other animals on the earth. And so it will continue to be until one yawning grave devours them all—just and unjust, there is no distinction in the grave—and hurls them back into the abyss of the aimless chaos of matter from which they were first drawn—they that were able to believe themselves the final end of creation.—Thus the end which this right-minded man would have, and ought to have, in view in his pursuit of the moral law, would certainly have to be abandoned by him as impossible. But perhaps he resolves to remain faithful to the call of his inner moral vocation and would not willingly permit the respect with which he is immediately inspired to obedience by the moral law be weakened owing to the nullity of the one ideal final end that answers to its high demand—which could not happen without doing injury to his moral disposition. If so he must assume the existence of a moral author of the world, that is, of a God. As this assumption at least involves nothing intrinsically self-contradictory he may quite readily make it from a practical point of view, that is to say, at least for the purpose of framing a conception of the possibility of the final end morally prescribed to him.	453
§ 88 Limitation of the validity of the moral proof
PURE reason, regarded as a practical faculty, a capacity, that is to say, for determining the pure employment of our causality by means of ideas, or pure rational concepts, not only possesses in its moral law a principle which is regulative of our actions, but by virtue of that law it furnishes at the same time an additional principle which, from a subjective point of view, is constitutive. This principle is contained in the concept of an object which reason alone is able to think, and which is meant to be realized in the world through our actions in conformity to that law. The idea of a final end in the employment of freedom in obedience to moral laws has, therefore, a reality that is subjectively practical. We are determined a priori by reason to further what is best for the world as far as this lies within our power. This consists in the union of the greatest welfare of the rational beings in the world with the supreme condition of their good, or, in other words, by the union of universal happiness with the strictest morality. Now the possibility of one of the factors of this final end, namely that of happiness, is empirically conditioned. It depends upon how nature is constituted—on whether nature harmonizes or not with this end. It is, therefore, from a theoretical point of view problematic; whereas the other factor, namely morality, in respect of which we are independent of the co-operation of nature, is a priori assured of its possibility and is dogmatically certain. Accordingly, the fact that we have a final end set before us a priori does not meet all the requirements of the objective and theoretical reality of the concept of the final end of rational beings in the world. It is further requisite that creation, that is, the world itself, should, in respect of its existence, have a final end. If we were able to prove a priori that it has such an end, this would supplement the subjective reality of the final end by a reality that is objective. For if creation has a final end at all we cannot conceive it otherwise than as harmonizing necessarily with our moral faculty, which is what alone makes the concept of an end possible. But, now, we do find in the world what are certainly ends. In fact physical teleology exhibits ends in such abundance that if we let reason guide our judgement we have after all justification for assuming, as a principle upon which to investigate nature, that there is nothing whatever in nature that has not got its end. Yet in nature itself we search in vain for its own final end. Hence, just as the idea of this final end resides only in reason, so it is only in rational beings that such an end itself can and must be sought as an objective possibility. But the practical reason of these beings does not merely assign this final end: it also determines this concept in respect of the conditions under which a final end of creation can alone be thought by us.	454
Now the question arises: Is it not possible to substantiate the objective reality of the concept of a final end in a manner that will meet the theoretical requirements of pure reason? This cannot indeed be done apodictically for determining judgement. Yet may it not be done sufficiently for the maxims of theoretical judgement in so far as it is reflective? This is the least that could be demanded of speculative philosophy, which undertakes to connect the ethical end with natural ends by means of the idea of a single end. Yet even this little is still far more than it can ever accomplish.
Let us look at the matter from the standpoint of the principle of theoretical reflective judgement. To account for the purposive products of nature are we not justified in assuming a supreme cause of nature, whose causality in respect of the actuality of nature, or whose act of creation, must be regarded as specifically different from that which is required for the mechanism of nature, or, in other words, as the causality of an understanding? If we are, then, on the above principle, we should say that we were also sufficiently justified in attributing to this original being, not merely ends prevalent throughout nature, but also a final end. This does not serve the purpose of proving the existence of such a being, yet, at least, as was the case in the physical teleology, it is a justification sufficient to convince us that to make the possibility of such a world intelligible to ourselves we must not merely look to ends, but must also ascribe its existence to an underlying final end.
But a final end is simply a concept of our practical reason and cannot be inferred from any data of experience for the purpose of forming a theoretical judgement of nature, nor can it be applied to the cognition of nature. The only possible use of this concept is for practical reason according to moral laws; and the final end of creation is such a constitution of the world as harmonizes with what we can only definitely specify according to laws, namely with the final end of our pure practical reason and of this, moreover, in so far as it is intended to be practical.—Now, by virtue of the moral law which enjoins this final end upon us, we have reason for assuming from a practical point of view, that is for the direction of our energies towards the realization of that end, that it is possible, or, in other words, practicable. Consequently we are also justified in assuming a nature of things harmonizing with such a possibility—for this possibility is subject to a condition which does not lie in our power, and without the assistance of nature the realization of the final end would be impossible. Hence, we have a moral justification for supposing that where we have a world we have also a final end of creation.	455
This does not yet bring us to the inference from moral teleology to a theology, that is, to the existence of a moral author of the world, but only to a final end of creation, which is defined in the above manner. Now must we, to account for this creation, that is, for the existence of things conformable to a final end, in the first place admit an intelligent being, and, in the second place, not merely an intelligent being—as had to be admitted to account for the possibility of such things in nature as we are compelled to judge as ends—but one that is also moral, as author of the world, and consequently a God? This admission involves a further inference, and one of such a nature that we see that it is intended for the power of judging by concepts of practical reason, and, being so, is drawn for reflective, not for determining judgement. It is true that with us morally practical reason is essentially different in its principles from technically practical reason. But, while this is so, we cannot pretend to see that the same distinction must also hold in the case of the supreme world-cause, if it is assumed to be an intelligence, and that a peculiar type of causality is required on its part for the final end, different from that which is requisite simply for natural ends, or, that we have, consequently, in our final end, not merely a moral ground for admitting a final end of creation, as an effect, but also a moral being, as the original source of creation. But it is quite competent for us to assert that the nature of our faculty of reason is such that without an author and governor of the world, who is also a moral lawgiver, we are wholly unable to render intelligible to ourselves the possibility of a purposiveness, related to the moral law and its object, such as exists in this final end.
The actuality of a supreme morally legislative author is, therefore, sufficiently proved simply for the practical employment of our reason, without determining anything theoretically in respect of its existence. For reason has an end which is prescribed independently by its own peculiar legislation. To make this end possible it requires an idea which removes, sufficiently for reflective judgement, the obstacle which arises from our inability to carry such legislation into effect when we have a mere physical conception of the world. In that way this idea acquires practical reality, although for speculative knowledge it fails of every means that would procure it reality from a theoretical point of view for explaining nature or determining its supreme cause. For theoretical reflective judgement an intelligent world-cause was sufficiently proved by physical teleology from the ends of nature. For practical reflective judgement moral teleology effects the same by means of the concept of a final end, which it is obliged to ascribe to creation from a practical point of view. The objective reality of the idea of God, regarded as a moral author of the world, cannot, it is true, be substantiated by means of physical ends alone. Nevertheless, when the knowledge of those ends is associated with that of the moral end, the maxim of pure reason which directs us to pursue unity of principles so far as we are able to do so lends considerable importance to these ends for the purpose of reinforcing the practical reality of that idea by the reality which it already possesses from a theoretical point of view for judgement.	456
In this connexion there are two points which it is most necessary to note for the purpose of preventing a misunderstanding which might easily arise. In the first place these attributes of the supreme being can only be thought by us on an analogy. For how are we to investigate its nature when experience can show us nothing comparable? In the second place, such attributes also only enable us to think a supreme being, not to cognize it or to predicate them of it in a more or less theoretical manner. For this could only be done on behalf of determining judgement, as a faculty of our reason in its speculative aspect, and for the purpose of discerning the intrinsic nature of the supreme world-cause. But the only question that concerns us here is as to what concept we have, by the structure of our cognitive faculties, to form of this being, and whether we have to admit its existence on account of an end, which pure practical reason, apart from any such assumption, enjoins upon us to realize as far as in us lies, and for which we seek likewise to procure simply practical reality, that is to say, merely to be able to regard an envisaged effect as possible. It may well be that this concept is
extravagant for speculative reason. The attributes also which by means	457
of it we ascribe to the being in question may, objectively used, involve a covert anthropomorphism. Yet the object which we have in view in employing them is not that we wish to determine the nature of that being by reference to them—a nature which is inaccessible to us—but rather that we seek to use them for determining our own selves and our will. We may name a cause after the concept which we have of its effect—though only in respect of the relation in which it stands to this effect. And we may do this without on that account seeking to define intrinsically the inherent nature of that cause by the only properties known to us of causes of that kind, which properties must be given to us by experience. We may, for instance, ascribe to the soul, among other properties, a vis locomotiva*, because physical movements are actually initiated, the cause of which lies in the mind’s activity of representing them. But this we do without on that account meaning to attribute to the soul the only kind of dynamical forces of which we have any knowledge—that is, those involving attraction, pressure, impact, and, consequently, motion, forces which always presuppose a being extended in space. Now in just the same way we have to assume something that contains the ground of the possibility and practical reality, or practicability, of a necessary moral final end. But, looking to the character of the effect expected therefrom, we may conceive this ‘something’ as a wise being ruling the world according to moral laws. And, in conformity with the character of our cognitive faculties, we are obliged to conceive it as a cause of things that is distinct from nature, for the sole purpose of expressing the relation in which this being that transcends all our cognitive faculties stands to the object of our practical reason. Yet in so doing we do not mean on that account to ascribe to this being theoretically the only causality of this kind familiar to us, namely an understanding and a will. Nor indeed, even as to the causality which we think exists in this being in respect of what is for us a final end, we do not mean to differentiate it objectively, as it exists in this being itself, from the causality in respect of nature and all its purposive determinations. On the contrary we only presume to be able to admit this distinction as one subjectively necessary for our cognitive faculty, constituted as it is, and as valid for reflective, and not for objectively determining judgement. But, once the question touches practical issues, a regulative principle of this kind—one for prudence or wisdom to follow—which directs us to act in conformity with something, as an end, the possibility of which, by the character of our cognitive faculties, can only be conceived by us in a certain manner, then becomes also constitutive. In other words it is practically determining, whereas the very same principle regarded as one upon which to judge the objective possibility of things is in no way theoretically determining, or, in other words, does not imply that the only type of possibility which
our thinking faculty recognizes may also be predicated	458
of the object of our thought. On the contrary it is a mere regulative principle for the use of reflective judgement.
Remark
This moral proof is not in any sense a newly discovered argument, but at the most only an old one in a new form. For its germ was lying in the human mind when our reason first quickened into life, and it only grew and developed with the progressive culture of that faculty. The moment human beings began to reflect upon right and wrong—at a time when they as yet cast but a heedless regard at the purposiveness of nature, and when they took advantage of it without imagining the presence of anything but nature’s accustomed course—one inevitable judgement must have forced itself upon them. It could never be a matter of indifference, whether a person has acted fairly or falsely, with equity or with violence, albeit to his life’s end, as far at least as human eye can see, his virtues have brought him no reward, and his transgressions no punishment. It seems as though they perceived a voice within them say that it must make a difference. So there must also have been a lurking notion, however obscure, of something after which they felt themselves bound to strive, and with which such a result would be wholly discordant, or with which, once they regarded the course of the world as the sole order of things, they would then be unable to reconcile that inner vocation of their minds. Now crude as are the various notions they might form of the way in which such an irregularity could be put straight—and it is one that must be far more revolting to the human mind than the blind chance which some have sought to make the underlying principle of their judgement of nature—there is only one principle upon which they could even conceive it possible for nature to harmonize with the moral law within them. It is that of a supreme cause ruling the world according to moral laws. For a final end within, that is set before them as a duty, and a nature without, that has no final end, though in it the former end is to be actualized, are in open contradiction. I admit they might hatch many absurdities concerning the inner nature of that world-cause. But that relation to the moral order in the government of the world always remained the same as is universally comprehensible to the most untutored reason, so far as it treats itself as practical, though speculative reason is far from being able to keep pace with it.—Further, in all probability, it was this moral interest that first aroused attentiveness to beauty and the ends of nature. This would be admirably calculated to strengthen the above idea, though it could not supply its foundation. Still less could it dispense with the moral interest; for it is only in relation to the final end that the very study of the ends of nature acquires that immediate interest displayed to so great an extent in the admiration bestowed upon nature without regard to any ensuing advantage.	459
§ 89 The use of the moral argument
THE fact that, in respect of all our ideas of the supersensible, reason is restricted to the conditions of its practical employment, is of obvious use in connexion with the idea of God. It prevents theology from losing itself in the clouds of THEOSOPHY, i.e. in transcendent conceptions that confuse reason, or from sinking into the depths of DEMONOLOGY, i.e. an anthropomorphic mode of representing the supreme being. Also it keeps religion from falling into theurgy, which is a fanatical delusion that a feeling can be communicated to us from other supersensible beings and that we in turn can exert an influence on them, or into idolatry, which is a superstitious delusion that one can make oneself acceptable to the supreme being by any other means than that of a moral disposition.7
For if the vanity or presumption of those who would argue about what lies beyond the sensible world is allowed to determine even the smallest point theoretically, and so as to extend our knowledge; if any boast is permitted of shedding light upon the existence and constitution of the divine nature, its intelligence and will, and the laws of both these and the attributes which issue therefrom and influence the world: then I should like to know at what precise point the line is going to be drawn for these pretensions of reason. From whatever source such light is derived still more may be expected—if, as the idea is, we only rack our brains. Yet it is only on some principle that bounds can be set to such claims—it is not enough simply to appeal to our experience of the fact that all attempts of the sort have so far miscarried; for that is no disproof of the possibility of a better result. But the only principle possible in this case is either that of admitting that in respect of the supersensible absolutely nothing can be determined theoretically (unless solely by way of bare negation), or that of supposing the existence in our reason of an as yet untapped mine of who knows how vast and enlightening information reserved for us and our posterity.—But the result, so far as concerns religion—that is, morality in relation to God as lawgiver—would be that morality, supposing that the theoretical knowledge of God has to take the lead, must then conform to theology. Thus not only will an extrinsic and arbitrary legislation on the part of a supreme being have to be introduced in place of an immanent and necessary legislation of reason, but, even in such legislation, all the defects of our insight into the divine nature must spread to the ethical code, and religion in this way be divorced from morality and perverted.	460
What now of the hope of a future life? It is open to us to look to the final end which, in obedience to the injunction of the moral law, we have ourselves to fulfil, and to adopt it as a guiding thread for the verdict of reason concerning our vocation—a verdict which is therefore only regarded as necessary or worthy of acceptance from a practical point of view. But if, instead of so doing, we consult our faculty of theoretical knowledge, then the same lot befalls psychology in this connexion as befell theology in the case above. It supplies no more than a negative conception of our thinking being. It tells us that not one of the operations of the mind or manifestations of inner sense can be explained on materialistic lines; that, accordingly, no illuminating or determining judgement as to the separate nature of what thinks, or of the continuance or discontinuance of its personality after death, can possibly be made on speculative grounds by any exercise of our faculty of theoretical knowledge, Thus everything is here left to the teleological judging of our existence from a point of view that is necessary in the practical sphere, and to the assumption of the continuance of our existence, as a condition required by the final end that is absolutely imposed upon us by reason. Hence in our negative result we see at once a gain—a gain that at first sight no doubt appears a loss. For just as theology can never become theosophy, so rational psychology can never become pneumatology, as a science that extends our knowledge, nor yet, on the other hand, be in danger of lapsing into any sort of materialism. On the contrary we see that it is really a mere anthropology of the inner sense, a knowledge, that is to say, of our thinking self as alive, and that, in the form of a theoretical cognition, it also remains merely empirical. But, as concerned with the problem of our eternal existence, rational psychology is not a theoretical science at all. It rests upon a single inference of moral teleology, just as the entire necessity of its employment arises out of moral teleology and our practical vocation.	461
§ 90 The type of assurance in a teleological proof of the existence of God
WHETHER a proof is derived from immediate empirical presentation of what is to be proved, as in the case of proof by observation of the object or by experiment, or whether it is derived a priori by reason from principles, what is primarily required of it is that it should not persuade, but convince, or at least tend to convince. The argument or inference, in other words, should not be simply a subjective, or aesthetic, ground of assent—a mere semblance—but should be objectively valid and a logical source of knowledge. If it is not this, intelligence is taken in, not won over. An illusory proof of the type in question is brought forward in natural theology—maybe with the best of intentions, but nevertheless with a deliberate concealment of its weakness. The whole host of arguments for an origin of the things of nature according to the principle of ends is marshalled before us, and capital is made out of the purely subjective ground of human reason. The latter is inclined, by its very character, wherever it can do so without contradiction, to think one single principle in place of several. Also, where this principle only provides one, or, it may be, a large proportion, of the terms necessary for defining a concept, it supplements this or these by adding the others, so as to complete the concept of the thing by an arbitrary extension. For naturally, when we find such a number of products of nature pointing us to an intelligent cause, should we not suppose one single such cause in preference to supposing a plurality of them? And why, then, stop at great intelligence, might, and so forth, in this cause, and not rather endow it with omniscience and omnipotence, and, in a word, regard it as one that contains an ample source of such attributes for all possible things? And why not go on and ascribe to this single all-powerful primordial being, not merely the intelligence necessary for the laws and products of nature, but also the supreme ethical and practical reason that belongs to a moral world-cause? For by this completion of the concept we are supplied with a principle that meets the joint requirements alike of insight into nature and moral wisdom—and no objection of the least substance can be brought against the possibility of such an idea. If now, in the course of this argument, the moral springs that stir the mind are touched, and a lively interest imparted to them with all the force of rhetoric—of which they are quite worthy—a persuasion arises of the objective sufficiency of the proof, and, in most cases where it is used, an even beneficent illusion that disdains any examination of its logical accuracy, and in fact abhors and sets its face against logical criticism, as if it sprang from some impious misgiving.—Now there is really nothing to say against all this, so long as we only take popular expediency into consideration. But we cannot and should not be deterred from the analysis of the proof into the two heterogeneous elements which this argument involves, namely into so much as pertains to physical, and so much as pertains to moral teleology. For the fusing of both elements prevents our recognizing where the real nerve of the proof lies, or in what part or in what way it must be reshaped, so that its validity may be able to be upheld under the most searching examination—even though on some points we should be compelled to confess that reason sees but a short way. Hence, the philosopher finds it his duty—supposing that he were even to pay no regard to what he owes to sincerity—to expose the illusion, however wholesome, which such a confusion can produce. He must segregate what is mere matter of persuasion from what leads to conviction—two modes of assent that differ not merely in degree but in kind—so as to be able to present openly in all its clearness the attitude which the mind adopts in this proof, and to subject it frankly to the most rigorous test.	462
Now a proof which is directed towards conviction may be of one or other of two kinds. It may be intended to decide what the object is in itself, or else what it is for us, that is, for man in the abstract, according to the rational principles on which it is necessarily judged by us. It may, in other words, be a proof or one *—taking the latter word in the broad sense of man in the abstract. In the first case it is grounded on principles adequate for determining judgement, in the second on such as are adequate merely for reflective judgement. Where, in the latter case, a proof rests simply on theoretical principles, it can never tend towards conviction. But if it is grounded on a practical principle of reason, one which, consequently, is universal and necessary, it may well lay claim to a conviction that is sufficient from a practical point of view, that is to a moral conviction. But a proof tends towards conviction, though without producing conviction, if it merely puts us on the road to conviction. This it does where it only involves objective sources of conviction which, while as yet insufficient to produce certitude, are nevertheless of such a kind that they are not subjective grounds of judgement, which, as such, serve merely for persuasion.	463
Now all arguments that establish a theoretical proof are sufficient either: (1) for proof by logically rigorous syllogistic inferences; or, where this is not the case, (2) for inference by analogy; or, should even such inference be absent, still (3) for probable opinion; or, finally, for what is least of all, (4) the assumption of a merely possible source of explanation as an hypothesis.—Now I assert that all arguments without exception that tend towards theoretical conviction, are powerless to produce any assurance of the above type, from its highest degree to its lowest, where the proposition that is to be proved is the existence of an original being, regarded as a God in the sense appropriate to the complete content of this concept, that is to say, regarded as a moral author of the world, and, consequently, in such a way that the final end of creation is at once derived from him.
1. The critique has abundantly shown* how the matter stands as regards proof in strict logical form—advancing, that is, from universal to particular. No intuition corresponding to the concept of a being which has to be sought beyond nature is possible for us. So far, therefore, as that concept has to be determined theoretically by synthetic predicates, it always remains for us a problematical concept. Hence, there exists absolutely no cognition of such a being that would in the smallest degree enlarge the reach of our theoretical knowledge. The particular conception of a supersensible being cannot possibly be subsumed in any way under the universal principles of the nature of things, so as to allow of its being determined by inference from those principles, for they are solely valid for nature as an object of the senses.	464
2. In the case of two dissimilar things we may admittedly form some concept of one of them by an analogy 8 which it bears to the other, and do so even on the point on which they are dissimilar; but from that in which they are dissimilar we cannot draw any inference from one to the other on the strength of the analogy—that is, we cannot transfer the mark of the specific difference to the second. Thus on the analogy of the law of the equality of action and reaction in the mutual attraction and repulsion of bodies I am able to picture to my mind the social relations of the members of a commonwealth regulated by civil laws; but I cannot transfer to these relations the former specific determinations, that is, physical attraction and repulsion, and ascribe them to the citizens, so as to constitute a system called a state.—In the same way the causality of the original being may, in its relation to the things of the world, regarded as natural ends, quite properly be conceived on the analogy of an intelligence, regarded as the source of the forms of certain products that we call works of art. For this is only done in the interests of the theoretical or practical use which our cognitive faculty has to make of this concept when dealing with the things in the world. But from the fact that with the beings of the world intelligence must be ascribed to the cause of an effect that is considered artificial, we are wholly unable to infer by analogy that, in relation to nature, the very same causality that we perceive in man belongs also to the being which is entirely distinct from nature. The reason is that this touches the precise point of dissimilarity between a cause that is sensuously conditioned in respect of its effects and a supersensible original being. This dissimilarity is implied in the very concept of such a supersensible being, and the distinguishing feature cannot therefore be transferred to it.—In this very fact, that I am required to conceive the causality of the Deity only on the analogy of an understanding—a faculty which is not known to us in any other being besides man, subjected, as he is, to the conditions of sensibility—lies the prohibition that forbids me to ascribe to God an understanding in the proper sense of the word.9	465
3. There is no room for opinion in a priori judgements. Such judgements, on the contrary, enable us to cognize something as quite certain, or else give us no cognition at all. But even where the given premisses from which we start are empirical, as are the natural ends in the present case, yet they cannot help us to form any opinion that extends beyond the sensible world, and to such rash judgements we cannot accord the least claim to probability. For probability is a fraction of a possible certainty distributed over a particular series of grounds—the grounds of the possibility within the series being compared with the sufficient ground of certainty, as a part is compared with a whole. Here the insufficient ground must be capable of being increased to the point of sufficiency. But these grounds, being the determining grounds of the certainty of one and the same judgement, must be of the same order. For unless they are, they would not, when taken together, form a quantum—such as certainty is. Thus one component part cannot lie within the bounds of possible experience, and another lie beyond all possible experience. Consequently, since premisses that are simply empirical do not lead to anything supersensible, nothing can supplement the imperfection of such an empirical series. Not the smallest approximation, therefore, occurs in the attempt to reach the supersensible, or a knowledge of it, from such premisses; and consequently no probability enters into a judgement about the supersensible, when it rests on arguments drawn from experience.	466
4. If anything is intended to serve as an hypothesis for explaining the possibility of a given phenomenon, then at least the possibility of that thing must be perfectly certain. We give away enough when, in the case of an hypothesis, we waive the knowledge of actual existence—which is affirmed in an opinion put forward as probable—and more than this we cannot surrender. At least the possibility of what we make the basis of an explanation must be open to no doubt, otherwise there would be no end to empty fictions of the brain. But it would be taking things for granted without anything whatever to go upon, if we were to assume the possibility of a supersensible being defined according to positive concepts, for no one of the conditions requisite for cognition, so far as concerns the element dependent on intuition, is given. Hence, all that is left as the criterion of this possibility is the principle of contradiction—which can only prove the possibility of the thought and not of the object which is thereby thought.
The net result is that for the existence of the original being, regarded as a Deity, or of the soul, regarded as an immortal spirit, it is absolutely impossible for human reason to obtain any proof from a theoretical point of view, so as to produce the smallest degree of assurance. And there is a perfectly intelligible reason for this, since we have no available material for defining the idea of the supersensible, seeing that we should have to draw that material from things in the world of the senses, and then its character would make it utterly inappropriate to the supersensible. In the absence, therefore, of all determination, we are left merely with the conception of a non-sensible something containing the ultimate ground of the sensible world. This constitutes no cognition of its intrinsic nature, such as would extend our concept of this ground.
§ 91 The type of assurance produced by a practical faith	467
IF we look merely to the manner in which something can be an object of knowledge (res cognoscibilis) for us, that is, having regard to the subjective nature of our powers of representation, we do not in that case compare our concepts with the objects, but merely with our faculties of cognition and the use that they are able to make of the given representation from a theoretical or practical point of view. So the question whether something is a cognizable entity or not, is a question which touches, not the possibility of the things themselves, but the possibility of our knowledge of them.
Things which can be known are of three kinds:* matters of opinion (opinabile), matters of fact (scibile), and matters of faith (mere credibile).
1. The objects of mere ideas of reason, being wholly incapable of presentation, on behalf of theoretical knowledge, in any possible experience whatever, are to that extent also things altogether unknowable, and, consequently, we cannot even form an opinion about them. For to form an opinion a priori is absurd on the face of it and the straight road to pure figments of the brain. Either our a priori proposition is certain, therefore, or it involves no element of assurance at all. Hence, matters of opinion are always objects of an empirical knowledge that is at least intrinsically possible. They are, in other words, objects belonging to the sensible world, but objects of which an empirical knowledge is impossible for us because the degree of empirical knowledge we possess is as it is. Thus the ether of our modern physicists—an elastic fluid interpenetrating all other substances and completely permeating them—is a mere matter of opinion, yet it is in all respects of such a kind that it could be perceived if our external senses were sharpened to the highest degree, but its presentation can never be the subject of any observation or experiment. To assume rational inhabitants of other planets is a matter of opinion; for if we could get nearer the planets, which is intrinsically possible, experience would decide whether such inhabitants are there or not; but as we never shall get so near to them, the matter remains one of opinion. But to entertain an opinion that there exist in the material universe pure unembodied thinking spirits is mere romancing—supposing, I mean, that we dismiss from our notice, as well we may, certain phenomena that have been passed off for such.* Such a notion is not a matter of opinion at all, but an idea pure and simple. It is what remains when we abstract from a thinking being all that is material and yet leave it in possession of its thought. But whether, when we have taken away everything else, the thought—which we only know in man, that is in connexion with a body—would still remain, is a matter we are unable to decide. A thing like this is a sophistical entity (ens rationis ratiocinantis), not an entity of reason (ens rationis ratiocinatae). With the latter it is anyway possible to substantiate the objective reality of its concept, at least in a manner sufficient for the practical employment of reason, for this employment, which has its peculiar and apodictically certain a priori principles, in fact demands and postulates that concept.	468
2. The objects that answer to concepts whose objective reality can be proved are matters of fact10 (res facti). Such proof may be afforded by pure reason or by experience, and in the former case may derive from theoretical or practical data of reason, but in all cases it must be effected by means of an intuition corresponding to the relevant concepts. Examples of matters of fact are the mathematical properties of geometrical magnitudes, for they admit of a priori presentation for the theoretical employment of reason. Further, things or qualities of things that are capable of being verified by experience, whether it be one’s own personal experience or that of others (supported by evidence), are in the same way matters of fact.—But there is this notable point, that one idea of reason, strange to say, is to be found among the matters of fact—an idea which does not of itself admit of any presentation in intuition, or, consequently, of any theoretical proof of its possibility. The idea in question is that of freedom. Its reality is the reality of a particular kind of causality (the concept of which would be transcendent if considered theoretically), and as a causality of that kind it admits of verification by means of practical laws of pure reason and in the actual actions that take place in obedience to them, and, consequently, in experience.—It is the only one of all the ideas of pure reason whose object is a matter of fact and must be included among the scibilia.
3. Objects that must be thought a priori, either as consequences or as grounds, if pure practical reason is to be used as duty commands, but which are transcendent for the theoretical use of reason, are mere matters of faith. Such is the highest good which has to be realized in the world through freedom—a concept whose objective reality cannot be proved in any experience possible for us, or, consequently, so as to satisfy the requirements of the theoretical employment of reason, while at the same time we are enjoined to use it for the purpose of realizing that end through pure practical reason in the best way possible, and, accordingly, its possibility must be assumed. This effect which is commanded, together with the only conditions on which its possibility is conceivable by us, namely the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, are matters of faith (res fidei) and, moreover, are of all objects the only ones that can be so called.11 For although we have to believe what we can only learn by testimony from the experience of others, yet that does not make what is so believed in itself a matter of faith, for with one of those witnesses it was personal experience and matter of fact, or is assumed to have been so. In addition it must be possible to arrive at knowledge by this path—the path of historical belief; and the objects of history and geography, as, in general, everything that the nature of our cognitive faculties makes at least a possible subject of knowledge, are to be classed among matters of fact, not matters of faith. It is only objects of pure reason that can be matters of faith at all, and even they must then not be regarded as objects simply of pure speculative reason; for this does not enable them to be reckoned with any certainty whatever among matters, or objects, of that knowledge which is possible for us. They are ideas, that is concepts, whose objective reality cannot be guaranteed theoretically. On the other hand, the supreme final end to be realized by us, which is all that can make us worthy of being ourselves the final end of a creation, is an idea that has objective reality for us in practical matters, and is a matter in this sense. But since we cannot procure objective reality for this concept from a theoretical point of view, it is a mere matter of faith on the part of pure reason, as are also God and immortality, the latter being the sole conditions under which, owing to the character of our human reason, we are able to conceive the possibility of that effect of the use of our freedom according to law. But assurance in matters of faith is an assurance from a purely practical point of view. It is a moral faith that proves nothing for pure rational knowledge as theoretical, but only for it as practical and directed to the fulfilment of its obligations. It in no way extends either speculation or the practical rules of prudence based upon the principle of self-love. If the supreme principle of all moral laws is a postulate, this involves the possibility of its supreme object, and, consequently, the condition under which we are able to conceive such possibility, being also postulated. This does not make the cognition of the latter any knowledge or any opinion of the existence or nature of these conditions, as a mode of theoretical knowledge, but a mere assumption, confined to practical matters and commanded in practical interests, on behalf of the moral use of our reason.	469 470
If we were able with any plausibility to make the ends of nature which physical teleology sets before us in such abundance the basis of a determinate concept of an intelligent world-cause, the existence of this being would not even then be a matter of faith. For as it would not be assumed on behalf of the performance of our duty, but only for the purpose of explaining nature, it would simply be the opinion and hypothesis best suited to our reason. Now the teleology in question does not lead in any way to a determinate concept of God. On the contrary such a concept can only be found in that of a moral author of the world, because this alone furnishes the final end to which we can assign ourselves only so far as we live in accordance with what the moral law prescribes to us as the final end, and, consequently, imposes upon us as a duty. Hence, it is only by relation to the object of our duty, as the condition which makes its final end possible, that the concept of God acquires the privilege of figuring in our assurance as a matter of faith. On the other hand, this very same concept cannot make its object valid as a matter of fact, for although the necessity of duty is quite plain for practical reason, yet the attainment of its final end, so far as it does not lie entirely in our own hands, is merely assumed in the interests of the practical employment of reason, and, therefore, is not practically necessary in the way duty itself is.12	471
Faith as habitus, not as actus,* is the moral attitude of reason in its assurance of the truth of what is beyond the reach of theoretical knowledge. It is the steadfast principle of the mind, therefore, according to which the truth of what must necessarily be presupposed as the condition of the supreme final end being possible is assumed as true in consideration of the fact that we are under an obligation to pursue that end13—and assumed notwithstanding that we have no insight into its possibility, though likewise none into its impossibility. Faith, in the plain acceptation of the term, is a confidence of attaining a purpose the furthering of which is a duty, but whose achievement is a thing of which we are unable to perceive the possibility—or, consequently, the possibility of what we can alone conceive to be its conditions. Thus the faith that has reference to particular objects is entirely a matter of morality, provided such objects are not objects of possible knowledge or opinion, in which latter case, and above all in matters of history, it must be called credulity and not faith. It is a free assurance, not of any matter for which dogmatic proofs can be found for theoretical determining judgement, nor of what we consider a matter of obligation, but of that which we assume in the interests of a purpose which we set before ourselves in accordance with laws of freedom. But this does not mean that it is adopted like an opinion formed on inadequate grounds. On the contrary it is something that is grounded in reason (though only in relation to its practical employment), and adequately so in this regard. For without it, when the moral attitude comes into collision with theoretical reason and fails to satisfy its demand for a proof of the possibility of the object of morality, it forfeits all its stability, and wavers between practical commands and theoretical doubts. To be incredulous is to adhere to the maxim of placing no reliance on testimony; but a person is unbelieving who denies all validity to the above ideas of reason because their reality has no theoretical foundation. Hence, such a person judges dogmatically. But a dogmatic unbelief cannot stand side by side with a moral maxim governing the attitude of the mind—for reason cannot command one to pursue an end that is recognized to be nothing but a fiction of the brain. But the case is different with a doubtful faith. For with such a faith the want of conviction from grounds of speculative reason is only an obstacle—one which a critical insight into the limits of this faculty can deprive of any influence upon conduct and for which it can make amends by a paramount practical assurance.	472 473
If we desire to replace certain mistaken efforts in philosophy, and to introduce a different principle, and gain influence for it, it gives great satisfaction to see just how and why such attempts were bound to miscarry.
God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul are the problems to whose solution, as their ultimate and unique goal, all the laborious preparations of metaphysics are directed. Now it was believed that the doctrine of freedom was only necessary as a negative condition for practical philosophy, whereas that of God and the nature of the soul, being part of theoretical philosophy, had to be proved independently and separately. Then each of those two concepts was subsequently to be united with what is commanded by the moral law (which is only possible on terms of freedom) and a religion was to be arrived at in this way. But we perceive at once that such attempts were bound to miscarry. For from simple ontological concepts of things in the abstract, or of the existence of a necessary being, we can form absolutely no concept of an original being determined by predicates which admit of being given in experience and which are therefore available for cognition. But should the concept be founded on experience of the physical purposiveness of nature, it could then in turn supply no proof adequate for morality or, consequently, the cognition of a God. Just as little could knowledge of the soul drawn from experience—which we can only obtain in this life—furnish a concept of its spiritual and immortal nature, or, consequently, one that would satisfy morality. Theology and pneumatology, regarded as problems framed in the interests of sciences pursued by a speculative reason, lie in their very implication beyond all our faculties of knowledge, and cannot, therefore, be established by means of any empirical data or predicates.—These two concepts, both that of God and that of the soul (in respect of its immortality), can only be defined by means of predicates which, although they themselves derive their possibility entirely from a supersensible source, must, for all that, prove their reality in experience, for this is the only way in which they can make possible a cognition of a wholly supersensible being.—Now the only concept of this kind to be found in human reason is that of the freedom of man subject to moral laws and, in conjunction therewith, to the final end which freedom prescribes by means of these laws. These laws and this final end enable us to ascribe, the former to the author of nature, the latter to man, the properties which contain the necessary conditions of the possibility of both. Thus it is from this idea that an inference can be drawn to the existence and the nature of both God and the soul—beings that otherwise would be entirely hidden from us.	474
Hence, the source of the failure of the attempt to attain to a proof of God and immortality by the merely theoretical route lies in the fact that no knowledge of the supersensible is possible if the path of natural concepts is followed. The reason why the proof succeeds, on the other hand, when the path of morals, that is, of the concept of freedom, is followed, is because from the supersensible, which in morals is fundamental (i.e. as freedom), there arises a definite law of causality. By means of this law the supersensible here not only provides material for the knowledge of the other supersensible, that is of the moral final end and the conditions of its practicability, but it also reveals its own reality, as a matter of fact, in actions. For that very reason, however, it is unable to afford any valid argument other than from a practical point of view—which is also the only one needful for religion.
There is something very remarkable in the way this whole matter stands. Of the three ideas of pure reason, God, freedom, and immortality, that of freedom is the one and only concept of the supersensible which (owing to the causality implied in it) proves its objective reality in nature by its possible effect there. By this means it makes possible the connexion of the two other ideas with nature, and the connexion of all three to form a religion. We are thus ourselves possessed of a principle which is capable of determining the idea of the supersensible within us, and, in that way, also of the supersensible without us, so as to constitute knowledge—a knowledge, however, which is only possible from a practical point of view. This is something of which mere speculative philosophy—which can only give a simply negative concept even of freedom—must despair. Consequently the concept of freedom, as the fundamental concept behind all unconditionally-practical laws, can extend reason beyond the bounds to which every (theoretical) concept of nature must remain hopelessly restricted.