Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/890

 854 KANT side of nature to the prescripts of morality, demands, as conditions of its possible realization, the permanence of ethical progress in the moral agent, the certainty of freedom in self-determination, and the necessary harmonizing of the spheres of sense and reason through the intelligent author or ground of both. These conditions, the postulates of practical reason, are the concrete expressions of the three transcendental ideas, and in them we have the full significance of the ideas for reason. Immortality of the soul, positive freedom of will, and the existence of an intelligent ground of things are specu lative ideas practically warranted, though theoretically neither demonstrable nor comprehensible. Thus reason as self-determining supplies notions of freedom ; reason as determined supplies categories of understanding. Union between the two spheres, which seem at first sight disparate, is found in the necessary postulate that reason shall be realized, for its realization is only possible in the sphere of sense. But such a union, when regarded in abstracto, rests upon, or involves, a notion of quite a new order, that of the adaptation of nature to reason, or, as it may be expressed, that of end in nature. Understanding and reason thus coalesce in the faculty of judgment, which mediates between, or brings together, the universal and particular elements in conscious experience. Judgment is here merely reflective ; that is to say, the particular element is given, so determined as to be possible material of knowledge, while the universal, not necessary for cognition, is supplied by reason itself. The empirical details of nature, which are not determined by the categories of understanding, are judged as being arranged or ordered by intelligence, fur in no other fashion could nature, in its particular, contingent aspect, be thought as forming a complete, consistent, intelligible whole. The investigation of the conditions under which adaptation of nature to intelligence is conceivable and possible makes up the subject of the third great Kritik, the Kritik of Judgment, a work presenting unusual difficulties to the interpreter of the Kantian system. The general principle of the adaptation of nature to our faculties of cognition has two specific applications, with the second of which it is more closely connected than with the first. In the first place, the adaptation may be merely subjective, when the empirical condition for the exercise of judgment is furnished by the feeling of pleasure or pain ; such adaptation is esthetic. In the second place, the adaptation may be objective or logical, when empirical facts are given of such akind that their possibility can be conceived only through the notion of the end realized in them ; such adaptation is teleological, and the empirical facts in question arc organisms. ^Esthetics, or the scientific consideration of the judgments resting on the feelings of pleasure and pain arising from the harmony or want of harmony between the particular of experience and the laws of understanding, is the special subject of the Kritik of Judgment, but the doctrine of teleology there unfolded is the more important for the complete view of the critical system. For the analysis of the teleological judgment and of the consequences flowing from it leads to the final statement of the nature of experience as conceived by Kant. The phenomena of organic production furnish data for a special kind of judgment, which, however, involves or rests upon a quite general principle, that of the contingency of the particular clement in nature and its subjectively necessary adaptation to our faculty of cognition. The notion of contingency arises, according to Kant, from the fact that understanding and sense are distinct, that understanding does not determine the particular of sense, and, consequently, that the principle of the adaptation of the particular to our understanding is merely supplied by reason on account of the peculiarity or limited character of understanding. End in nature, therefore, is a subjective or problematic conception, implying the limits of understanding, and consequently resting upon the idea of an understanding constituted unlike ours, of an intuitive under standing in which particular and universal should be given together. The idea of such an inderstanding is, for cognition, transcendent, for no corresponding fact of intuition is furnished, but it is realized with practical certainty in relation to reason as practical. For we are, from practical grounds, compelled with at least practical necessity to ascribe a certain aim or end to this supreme understand ing. The moral law, or reason as practical, prescribes the realiza tion of the highest good, and such realization implies a higher order than that of nature. We must, therefore, regard the supreme cause as a moral cause, and nature as so ordered that realization of the moral end is in it possible. The final conception of the Kantian philosophy is, therefore, that of ethical Meology. As Kant expresses it in a remarkable passage of the Kritik, &quot;The systematic unity of ends in this world of intelligences, which, although as mere nature it is to be called only the world of sense, can yet as a system of freedom be called an intelligible, i.e., moral world (regnum gratise), leads inevitably to the teleogical unity of all things which consti tute this great vrhole according to universal natural laws, just as the unity of the former is according to universal and necessary moral laws, and unites the practical with the speculative reason. The world must be represented as having originated from an idea, if it is to harmonize with that use of reason without which we should hold ourselves unworthy of reason viz., the moral use, which rests entirely on the idea of the supreme good. Hence all natural research tends towards the form of a system of ends, and in its highest development would be a physico-theology. But this, since it arises from the moral order as a unity grounded in the very essence of freedom and not accidentally instituted by external commands, establishes the teleology of nature on grounds which a priori must be inseparably connected with the inner possibility of things. The teleology of nature is thus made to rest on a transcen dental theology, which takes the ideal of supreme ontological per fection as a principle of systematic unity, a principle which connects all things according to universal and necessary natural laws, sicce they all have their origin in the absolute necessity of a single primal being&quot; (p. 538). Editions of Kant s Works. The standard collective editions are (1) that byEosenkranz and Schubert, 12 vols., 1838-42, containing in vol. ii. the Life by Schubert, and in vol. xii. a History of the Kantian Philosophy by Eosenkranz ; (2) that by Hartenstein, in 10 vols., 1838-39; (3) a second edition by Hartenstein, in 8 vols., 1867-69, in which the arrangement is strictly chronological ; (4) that by Kirchmann, in 8 vols., 1868. Convenient editions of the three Kritiks have been published by Kehrbach, and critical editions of the Prolegomena and Kritik d. r. Vcrnunft by B. Erdmann, whose treatise Kants Kriticismus in d. crsten uncl zweitcn Aufiage d. Kr. d. r. Vcrnunft, 1878, and pamphlet, Nachtrdgc su K. Kr. d. r. Vcrnuiift, 1881, contain much interesting matter. Of works upon the Kantian philosophy the number is very great. A brief notice of them is given in the bibliographical references in Ueberweg s Gcsch. d. Philosophic, Bd. iii., 18-20. A very com prehensive survey is contained in the recent work by H. Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kants Kritik dcr reinen Vernuvft, 1881, where the older and more recent literature is elaborately classified and briefly characterized. (B. AD.) END OP VOLUME THIRTEENTH. NEILL AND COMPANY, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.