Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/164

Rh Organic life presents an analogy to the beautiful, the sublime, and the ingenious. Nature employs a method in the organic realm for which we really have no concept. Here we do not discover a being originated by the mechanical articulation and interaction of parts; nor have we the right, scientifically, to assume an antecedent plan according to which the parts are afterwards combined (as in the case of human architecture). The organism is therefore unexplainable either teleologically or mechanically. But perhaps the antithesis between the mechanical and the teleological explanations of nature rests merely on the peculiarity of our knowledge. Our understanding proceeds discursively, i. e. it proceeds from the parts to the whole, and if the parts are to be regarded as defined from the viewpoint of the whole, we are obliged to apply the anthropomorphic analogy with human purposes. But in pure being the same regulation which provides for the causal unity of things might perhaps also account for the possibility of the origin of organic forms capable of adaptation. It might be that the principles of mechanism and of teleology are after all identical in the unknown grounds of nature.

The same might be true also of the antithesis of pure reason which formulates natural laws, and the practical reason which propounds ethical ideals. Such being the case it would follow that it is one and the same principle which is revealed in the laws of nature and in the principles of ethics!

Here Kant reverts at the conclusion of his career, to a theory which had engaged him considerably during his early life (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels. Einzig moglicher Beweisgrund), and which