THE DOCTRINE OF FINAL CAUSES. 513 



Among the philosophers who have referred our 

 conviction of the being of God to our moral nature, 

 and have denied the possibility of demonstration on 

 mere physical grounds, Kant is perhaps the most 

 eminent. Yet he has asserted the reality of such a 

 principle of physiology as we are now maintaining 

 in the most emphatic manner. Indeed, this assump- 

 tion of an end makes his very definition of an or- 

 ganized being. " An organized product of nature is 

 that in which all the parts are mutually ends and 

 means ls ." And this, he says, is a universal and 

 necessary maxim. He adds, " It is well known that 

 the anatomizers of plants and animals 4 , in order to 

 investigate their structure, and to obtain an insight 

 into the grounds why and to what end such parts, 

 why such a situation and connexion of the parts, 

 and exactly such an internal form, come before them, 

 assume, as indispensably necessary, this maxim, that 

 in such a creature nothing is in vain, and proceed 

 upon it in the same way in which in general natu- 

 ral philosophy we proceed upon the principle that 

 nothing happens by chance. In fact, they can as 

 little free themselves from this teleological principle 

 as from the general physical one; for as, on omitting 

 the latter, no experience would be possible, so on 

 omitting the former principle, no clue could exist 

 for the observation of a kind of natural objects 

 which can be considered teleologically under the 

 conception of natural ends." 



18 Urtheilskraft, p. 296. 

 VOL. III. L L 



