WE do not need to look beyond transcendental principles to find ample reason for assuming a subjective purposiveness on the part of nature in its particular laws. This is a purposiveness relative to comprehensibility—with respect to the human power of judgement—and to the possibility of uniting particular experiences into a connected system of nature. In this system, then, we may further anticipate the possible existence of some among the many products of nature that, as if designed with special regard to our power of judgement, are of a form particularly adapted to that faculty. Forms of this kind are those which by their combination of unity and heterogeneity serve as it were to strengthen and entertain the mental powers that enter into play in the exercise of the faculty of judgement, and to them the name of beautiful forms is accordingly given. |
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But the universal idea of nature, as the sum of objects of the senses, gives us no reason whatever for assuming that things of nature serve one another as means to ends, or that their very possibility is only made fully intelligible by a causality of this sort. For since, in the case of the beautiful forms above mentioned, the representation of the things is something in ourselves, it can quite readily be thought even a priori as one well-adapted and suitable for disposing our cognitive faculties to an internally purposive harmony. But where the ends are not ends of our own, and do not belong even to nature (which we do not take to be an intelligent being), there is no reason at all for presuming a priori that they may or ought nevertheless to constitute a special kind of causality or at least a quite peculiar order of nature. What is more, the actual existence of these ends cannot be proved by experience—save on the assumption of an antecedent process of mental jugglery that only reads the conception of an end into the nature of the things, and that, not deriving this conception from the objects and what it knows of them from experience, makes use of it more for the purpose of rendering nature intelligible to us by an analogy to a subjective ground upon which our representations are brought into inner connexion, than for that of cognizing nature from objective grounds. |
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Besides, objective purposiveness, as a principle upon which physical objects are possible, is so far from attaching necessarily to the conception of nature, that it is the stock example adduced to show the contingency of nature and its form. So where the structure of a bird, for instance, the hollow formation of its bones, the position of its wings for producing motion and of its tail for steering, are cited, we are told that all this is in the highest degree contingent if we simply look to the nexus effectivus in nature, and do not call in aid a special kind of causality, namely, that of ends (nexus finalis). This means that nature, regarded as mere mechanism, could have fashioned itself in a thousand other different ways without lighting precisely on the unity based on a principle like this, and that, accordingly, it is only outside the conception of nature, and not in it, that we may hope to find some shadow of ground a priori for that unity. |
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We are right, however, in drawing upon teleological judging, at least problematically, with regard to the investigation of nature; but only with a view to bringing it under principles of observation and research by analogy to the causality that looks to ends, while not pretending to explain it by this means. Thus this is an activity of reflective, not of determining, judgement. Yet the conception of combinations and forms in nature that are determined by ends is at least one more principle for reducing its phenomena to rules in cases where the laws of its purely mechanical causality do not carry us sufficiently far. For we are bringing forward a teleological ground where we endow a concept of an object—as if that concept were to be found in nature instead of in ourselves—with causality in respect of the object, or rather where we represent to ourselves the possibility of the object on the analogy of a causality of this kind—a causality such as we experience in ourselves—and so regard nature as possessed of a capacity of its own for acting technically; whereas if we did not ascribe such a mode of operation to nature, its causality would have to be regarded as blind mechanism. But this is a different thing from crediting nature with causes acting designedly, to which it may be regarded as subjected in following its particular laws. The latter would mean that teleology is based, not merely on a regulative principle, directed to the simple judging of phenomena, but is actually based on a constitutive principle available for deriving natural products from their causes: with the result that the concept of a natural end would no longer belong to reflective, but to determining, judgement. But in that case the concept would not really be specially connected with the power of judgement, as is the concept of beauty as a formal subjective purposiveness. It would, on the contrary, be a concept of reason, and would introduce a new causality into science—one which we are borrowing all the time solely from ourselves and attributing to other beings, although we do not mean to assume that they and we are similarly constituted. |
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