III. Critique of Judgment1

While the Critique of Practical Reason, with its categori cal imperative, its primacy of the conscience, and its absolute independence of morality, satisfies Kant's moral feeling and his great love of liberty, which had been shaken by the conclusions of the Critique of Pure Reason, the philosophical instinct reasserts itself in his æsthetics and teleology, which form the subject-matter of his Critique of Judgment. We have seen how, in the Critique of Pure Reason, he universally combines synthesis with analysis, how he solders together the heterogeneous parts of the cognitive apparatus: between the functions of sensibility and those of reason he discovers the intermediate function of the idea of time, which is half intuition, half category; between a priori concepts which are diametrically opposed, he inserts intermediary categories. The same synthetic impulse leads him, in his Critique of Judgment, to bridge over the chasm which separates theoretical reason and the conscience.2

The æsthetical and teleological sense is an intermediate faculty, a connecting link between the understanding and the will. Truth is the object of the understanding, nature and natural necessity its subject-matter. The will strives for the good; it deals with freedom. The æsthetical and teleological sense (or judgment in the narrow sense of the term) is concerned with what lies between the true and the good, between nature and liberty: we mean the beautiful and the purposive. Kant calls it judgment because of the analogy between its manifestations and what is called judgment in logic; like the judgment, the sense of the

1 [A. Stadler, Kant's Teleologie, etc., Berlin, 1874; H. Cohen, Kant's Begründung der Aesthetik, Berlin, 1889; J. Goldfriedrich, Kant's Aesthetik, Leipsic, 1895; J. H. Tufts, The Sources and Development of Kant' Teleology, Chicago, 1892. — TR.].

2 Kritik der Urtheilskraft, p. 14.

beautiful and the teleological establishes a relation between two things which as such have nothing in common: between what ought to be and what is, between freedom and natural necessity.

1. Esthetics. The æsthetical sense differs both from the understanding and the will. It is neither theoretical

nor practical in character; it is a phenomenon sui generis. But it has this in common with reason and will, that it rests on an essentially subjective basis. Just as reason constitutes the true, and will the good, so the aesthetical sense makes the beautiful. Beauty does not inhere in objects; it does not exist apart from the æsthetical sense; it is the product of this sense, as time and space are the products of the theoretical sense. That is beautiful which pleases (quality), which pleases all (quantity), which pleases without interest and without a concept (relation), and pleases necessarily (modality).1

What characterizes the beautiful and distinguishes it from the sublime, is the feeling of peace, tranquillity, or harmony which it arouses in us, in consequence of the perfect agreement between the understanding and the imagination. The sublime, on the other hand, disturbs us, agitates us, transports us. Beauty dwells in the form; the sublime, in the disproportion between the form and the content. The beautiful calms and pacifies us; the sublime brings disorder into our faculties; it produces discord between the reason, which conceives the infinite, and the imagination, which has its fixed limits. The emotion caused in us by the starry heavens, the storm, and the raging sea springs from the conflict aroused by these different phenomena between our reason, which can measure the forces of nature and the heavenly distances without being overwhelmed by the enormous figures, and our imagination, which cannot

1 Kritik der Urtheilskraft, pp. 45 ff.

follow reason into the depths of infinity. Man has a feeling of grandeur, because he himself is grand through reason. The animal remains passive in the presence of the grand spectacles of nature, because its intelligence does not rise. beyond the level of its imagination. Hence we aptly say, the sublime elevates the soul (das Erhabene ist erhebend). In the feeling of the sublime, man reveals himself as a being infinite in reason, finite in imagination. Both infinite and finite: how is that possible? Kant cannot fathom this mystery without surpassing the limits which he has prescribed to knowledge.1

2. Teleology.2-There are two kinds of purposiveness. The one arouses in us, immediately and without the aid of any concept, a feeling of pleasure, satisfaction, and inner harmony this is subjective finality, which constitutes the beautiful. The other also arouses pleasure, but mediately, in consequence of an experience or an intermediate process of reasoning: this is objective finality, which constitutes the suitable (das Zweckmässige). Thus, a flower may be both the object of an æsthetical judgment in the artist, and of a teleological judgment in the naturalist, who has tested its value as a remedy. Only, the judgment which stamps it as beautiful is immediate and spontaneous, while that of the naturalist depends on previous experience.

The Critique of Pure Reason regards every phenomenon. as a necessary effect, and therefore excludes purposiveness from the phenomenal world. Physics merely enumerates an infinite series of causes and effects. Teleology introduces between the cause and the effect, considered as the end or goal, the means, the instrumental cause. Theoretically, teleology is valueless. However, we cannot avoid it so long as we apply our teleological sense to the study of nature. Unless we abandon one of our faculties, which is

1 Kritik der Urtheilskraft, pp. 97 ff.; 399 ff.

2 Id., pp. 239 ff.

as real and inevitable as reason and will, we cannot help recognizing purposiveness in the structure of the eye, the ear, and the organism in general. Though mechanism. fully explains the inorganic world, the teleological view forces itself upon us when we come to consider anatomy, physiology, and biology.

The antinomy of mechanism, affirmed by the theoretical reason, and teleology, claimed by the teleological sense, is no more insoluble than that of necessity and freedom.1 Teleology is nothing but a theory concerning phenomena. It no more expresses the essence of things than mechanism. This essence is as unknowable for the Critique of Judgment as for the Critique of Pure Reason. Things-in-themselves are not in time; they have no succession, no duration. According to mechanism, the cause and its effect, according to teleology, the free cause, the means, and the goal at which it aims, follow each other, i. e., they are separated in time. But time is merely an a priori form of intuition, a mode of conceiving things; as such and apart from my thought or my theory, the cause and the effect of the mechanist, the creative agent, the means, and the goal of the teleologist, are in each other, inseparable, simultaneous. Imagine an understanding which is not bound to the a priori forms of space and time like ours, a free and absolute intellectual intuition: such an understanding would perceive the cause, the means, and the end at one glance; it would identify the end and the principle; the end would not follow the efficient cause, but would be immanent in it and identical with it. Immanent teleology, which identifies the ends of nature with the acting causes, is the natural solution of the antinomy of mechanism and purposiveness.

We see that the subjectivity of time and space is the most

1 Kritik der Urtheilskraft, pp. 302 ff.

original and, on the whole, the most fruitful of Fant's teachings. There is no question so subtle, no problem so obscure, as not to be illuminated by it. Space and time are the eyes of the mind, the organs which reveal to it its inexhaustible content. These organs are at the same time the boundaries of its knowledge. But in spite of this insurmountable barrier, it feels free, immortal, and divine; and it declares its independence in the field of action. It is the mind which prescribes its laws to the phenomenal world; it is the mind from which the moral law proceeds; it is the mind and its judgment which make the beautiful beautiful. In short, the three Critiques culminate in ab solute spiritualism. Kant compared his work to that of Copernicus: just as the author of the Celestial Revolutions puts the sun in the place of the earth in our planetary system, so the author of the Critique places the mind in the centre of the phenomenal world and makes the latter dependent upon it. Kant's philosophy is, undoubtedly, the most remarkable and most fruitful product of modern thought. With a single exception, perhaps, the greatest systems which our century has produced are continuations of Kantianism. Even those-and their number has grown during the last thirty years who have again taken up the Anglo-French philosophy of the eighteenth century, revere the illustrious name of Immanuel Kant.

1 We mean the system of Comte, which is closely related to the French philosophy of the eighteenth century. Comte himself says, in a letter to Gustave d'Eichthal, dated December 10th, 1824: "I have always considered Kant not only as a very powerful thinker, but also as the metaphysician who most closely approximates the positive philosophy."