affection. For such affections, since they dilate the heart and render
it inert and thus exhaust its powers, show that a strain is kept on
being exerted and re-exerted on these powers by the representations,
but that the mind is allowed continually to relapse and get languid
upon recognition of the impossibility before it. Even prayers for
the aversion of great, and, so far as we can see, inevitable evils,
and many superstitious means for attaining ends impossible of
attainment by natural means, prove the causal reference of
representations to their objects-a causality which not even the
consciousness of inefficiency for producing the effect can deter
from straining towards it. But why our nature should be furnished with
a propensity to consciously vain desires is a teleological problem
of anthropology. It would seem that were we not to be determined to
the exertion of our power before we had assured ourselves of the
efficiency of our faculty for producing an object, our power would
remain to a large extent unused. For as a rule we only first learn
to know our powers by making trial of them. This deceit of vain
desires is therefore only the result of a beneficent disposition in
our nature.

  Hence, despite the fact of philosophy being only divisible into
two principal parts, the theoretical and the practical, and despite
the fact of all that we may have to say of the special principles of
judgement having to be assigned to its theoretical part, i.e., to
rational cognition according to concepts of nature: still the Critique
of Pure Reason, which must settle this whole question before the above
system is taken in hand, so as to substantiate its possibility,
consists of three parts: the Critique of pure understanding, of pure
judgement, and of pure reason, which faculties are called pure on
the ground of their being legislative a priori.

         IV. Judgement as a Faculty by which Laws are

                     prescribed a priori.

  Judgement in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as
contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule,
principle, or law) is given, then the judgement which subsumes the
particular under it is determinant. This is so even where such a
judgement is transcendental and, as such, provides the conditions a
priori in conformity with which alone subsumption under that universal
can be effected. If, however, only the particular is given and the
universal has to be found for it, then the judgement is simply
reflective.

  The determinant judgement determines under universal
transcendental laws furnished by understanding and is subsumptive
only; the law is marked out for it a priori, and it has no need to
devise a law for its own guidance to enable it to subordinate the
particular in nature to the universal. But there are such manifold
forms of nature, so many modifications, as it were, of the universal
transcendental concepts of nature, left undetermined by the laws
furnished by pure understanding a priori as above mentioned, and for
the reason that these laws only touch the general possibility of a
nature (as an object of sense), that there must needs also be laws
in this behalf. These laws, being empirical, may be contingent as
far as the light of our understanding goes, but still, if they are
to be called laws (as the concept of a nature requires), they must
be regarded as necessary on a principle, unknown though it be to us,
of the unity of the manifold. The reflective judgement which is
compelled to ascend from the particular in nature to the universal
stands, therefore, in need of a principle. This principle it cannot
borrow from experience, because what it has to do is to establish just
the unity of all empirical principles under higher, though likewise
empirical, principles, and thence the possibility of the systematic
subordination of higher and lower. Such a transcendental principle,
therefore, the reflective judgement can only give as a law from and to
itself. It cannot derive it from any other quarter (as it would then
be a determinant judgement). Nor can it prescribe it to nature, for
reflection on the laws of nature adjusts itself to nature, and not
nature to the conditions according to which we strive to obtain a
concept of it-a concept that is quite contingent in respect of these
conditions.

  Now the principle sought can only be this: as universal laws of
nature have their ground in our understanding, which prescribes them
to nature (though only according to the universal concept of it as
nature), particular empirical laws must be regarded, in respect of
that which is left undetermined in them by these universal laws,
according to a unity such as they would have if an understanding
(though it be not ours) had supplied them for the benefit of our
cognitive faculties, so as to render possible a system of experience
according to particular natural laws. This is not to be taken as
implying that such an understanding must be actually assumed (for it
is only the reflective judgement which avails itself of this idea as a
principle for the purpose of reflection and not for determining
anything); but this faculty rather gives by this means a law to itself
alone and not to nature.

  Now the concept of an object, so far as it contains at the same time
the ground of the actuality of this object, is called its end, and the
agreement of a thing with that constitution of things which is only
possible according to ends, is called the finality of its form.
Accordingly the principle of judgement, in respect of the form of
the things of nature under empirical laws generally, is the finality
of nature in its multiplicity. In other words, by this concept
nature is represented as if an understanding contained the ground of
the unity of the manifold of its empirical laws.

  The finality of nature is, therefore, a particular a priori concept,