V GENERAL REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 287 



so explained, and without which ' there can be no proper know- 

 ledge of Nature at all/ should in all cases be pushed as far as it 

 will go, 1 for this is the principle of the determinant judgement. 2 

 There are cases, however, in which this alone does not 

 suffice. 3 The possibility of the growth and nutrition, above all 

 of the reproduction and regeneration of organisms is only fully 

 intelligible to human reason through another quite distinct kind of 

 causality, their purposiveness. Organisms are not mere machines, 

 for those have merely moving power. Organisms possess in them- 

 selves formative power of a self-propagating kind which they 

 communicate to their materials. They are, in fact, natural 

 purposes, both cause and effect of themselves, in which the parts 

 so combine that they are reciprocally both end and means,, 

 existing not only by means of one another but for the sake of 

 one another and the whole. The whole is thus an end which 

 determines the process, a final cause which ' brings together the 

 required matter, modifies it, forms it, and puts it in its appropriate 



1 70, 78, 79, 80. 



2 It should be mentioned, perhaps, that Kant employs the terms 

 'determinant' and 'reflective' judgement in two senses. In the Intro- 

 duction to the Kritik of Judgement judgement is defined as that faculty 

 which thinks the particular as contained under the universal, and 

 is stated to be of two kinds. It is ' determinant ' when the universal 

 is given (as in the mathematical sciences). When, however, only the 

 particular is given, for which the universal has to be found (as in the 

 inductive sciences), it is ' reflective ', and Kant insists that the ' reflective ' 

 judgement requires a principle which it cannot borrow from experience, 

 and this principle is, in brief, the ultimate intelligibility of Nature by us. 

 Only so far as this holds good can we hope to gain a knowledge of 

 general, empirical laws of causation. 



The ' reflective ' judgement is again of two kinds, for which Kant, 

 however unfortunately, employs the same two terms, ' determinant ' and 

 ' reflective'. The duty of the former is, assuming that all phenomena are 

 explicable in mechanical terms ('causal' terms in the usual sense of the 

 word), to push the analysis of these efficient causes (nexus effectitus) to 

 its extreme limit. The latter, on the other hand, is concerned with 

 a kind of causality after the analogy of our own causality according to 

 purposes, in order that it may have before it a rule according to which 

 certain products of nature, namely organisms, must be investigated. 

 The whole argument of the Kritik is directed to proving that these two 

 uses of the judgement are mutually supplementary and both indispensable, 

 though in the last resort the first has to be subordinated to the second. 



In the text the terms ' determinant ' and ' reflective ' are used in the 

 second sense. The ' determinant judgement ' of the deductive sciences 

 does not of course come into this discussion at all. 



3 64-66. 



