criticism-must be a task involving considerable difficulties. For this
principle is one which must not be derived from a priori concepts,
seeing that these are the property of understanding, and judgement
is only directed to their application. It has, therefore, itself to
furnish a concept, and one from which, properly, we get no cognition
of a thing, but which it can itself employ as a rule only-but not as
an objective rule to which it can adapt its judgement, because, for
that, another faculty of judgement would again be required to enable
us to decide whether the case was one for the application of the
rule or not.

  It is chiefly in those estimates that are called aesthetic, and
which relate to the beautiful and sublime, whether of nature or of
art, that one meets with the above difficulty about a principle (be it
subjective or objective). And yet the critical search for a
principle of judgement in their case is the most important item in a
critique of this faculty. For, although they do not of themselves
contribute a whit to the knowledge of things, they still belong wholly
to the faculty of knowledge, and evidence an immediate bearing of this
faculty upon the feeling of pleasure or displeasure according to
some a priori principle, and do so without confusing this principle
with what is capable of being a determining ground of the faculty of
desire, for the latter has its principles a priori in concepts of
reason. Logical estimates of nature, however, stand on a different
footing. They deal with cases in which experience presents a
conformity to law in things, which the understanding's general concept
of the sensible is no longer adequate to render intelligible or
explicable, and in which judgement may have recourse to itself for a
principle of the reference of the natural thing to the unknowable
supersensible and, indeed, must employ some such principle, though
with a regard only to itself and the knowledge of nature. For in these
cases the application of such an a priori principle for the
cognition of what is in the world is both possible and necessary,
and withal opens out prospects which are profitable for practical
reason. But here there is no immediate reference to the feeling of
pleasure or displeasure. But this is precisely the riddle in the
principle of judgement that necessitates a separate division for
this faculty in the critique-for there was nothing to prevent the
formation of logical estimates according to concepts (from which no
immediate conclusion can ever be drawn to the feeling of pleasure or
displeasure) having been treated, with a critical statement of its
limitations, in an appendage to the theoretical part of philosophy.

  The present investigation of taste, as a faculty of aesthetic
judgement, not being undertaken with a view to the formation or
culture of taste (which will pursue its course in the future, as in
the past, independently of such inquiries), but being merely
directed to its transcendental aspects, I feel assured of its
indulgent criticism in respect of any shortcomings on that score.
But in all that is relevant to the transcendental aspect it must be
prepared to stand the test of the most rigorous examination. Yet
even here I venture to hope that the difficulty of unravelling a
problem so involved in its nature may serve as an excuse for a certain
amount of hardly avoidable obscurity in its solution, provided that
the accuracy of our statement of the principle is proved with all
requisite clearness. I admit that the mode of deriving the phenomena
of judgement from that principle has not all the lucidity that is
rightly demanded elsewhere, where the subject is cognition by
concepts, and that I believe I have in fact attained in the second
part of this work.

  With this, then, I bring my entire critical undertaking to a
close. I shall hasten to the doctrinal part, in order, as far as
possible, to snatch from my advancing years what time may yet be
favourable to the task. It is obvious that no separate division of
doctrine is reserved for the faculty of judgement, seeing that, with
judgement, critique takes the place of theory; but, following the
division of philosophy into theoretical and practical, and of pure
philosophy in the same way, the whole ground will be covered by the
metaphysics of nature and of morals.

INTRO

                         INTRODUCTION.

                  I. Division of Philosophy.

  Philosophy may be said to contain the principles of the rational
cognition that concepts afford us of things (not merely, as with
logic, the principles of the form of thought in general irrespective
of the objects), and, thus interpreted, the course, usually adopted,
of dividing it into theoretical and practical is perfectly sound.
But this makes imperative a specific distinction on the part of the
concepts by which the principles of this rational cognition get
their object assigned to them, for if the concepts are not distinct
they fail to justify a division, which always presupposes that the
principles belonging to the rational cognition of the several parts of
the science in question are themselves mutually exclusive.

  Now there are but two kinds of concepts, and these yield a
corresponding number of distinct principles of the possibility of
their objects. The concepts referred to are those of nature and that
of freedom. By the first of these, a theoretical cognition from a
priori principles becomes possible. In respect of such cognition,
however, the second, by its very concept, imports no more than a
negative principle (that of simple antithesis), while for the
determination of the will, on the other hand, it establishes
fundamental principles which enlarge the scope of its activity, and
which on that account are called practical. Hence the division of
philosophy falls properly into two parts, quite distinct in their