For it might easily be thought that, in spite of all the uniformity of
natural things according to the universal laws, without which we should
not have the form of an empirical cognition in general, the specific
variety of the empirical laws of nature including their effects might
yet be so great, that it would be impossible for our Understanding, to
detect in nature a comprehensible order; to divide its products into
genera and species, so as to use the principles which explain and make
intelligible one for the explanation and comprehension of another; or
out of such confused material (strictly we should say, so infinitely
various and not to be measured by our faculty of comprehension) to make
a connected experience.
The Judgement has therefore also in itself a principle _a priori_ of
the possibility of nature, but only in a subjective aspect; by which
it prescribes, not to nature (autonomy), but to itself (heautonomy)
a law for its reflection upon nature. This we might call the _law of
the specification of nature_ in respect of its empirical laws. The
Judgement does not cognise this _a priori_ in nature, but assumes it
on behalf of a natural order cognisable by our Understanding in the
division which it makes of the universal laws of nature when it wishes
to subordinate to these the variety of particular laws. If then we say
that nature specifies its universal laws according to the principles of
purposiveness for our cognitive faculty, _i.e._ in accordance with the
necessary business of the human Understanding of finding the universal
for the particular which perception offers it, and again of finding
connexion for the diverse (which however is a universal for each
species) in the unity of a principle,--we thus neither prescribe to
nature a law, nor do we learn one from it by observation (although such
a principle may be confirmed by this means). For it is not a principle
of the determinant but merely of the reflective Judgement. We only
require that, be nature disposed as it may as regards its universal
laws, investigation into its empirical laws may be carried on in
accordance with that principle and the maxims founded thereon, because
it is only so far as that holds that we can make any progress with the
use of our Understanding in experience, or gain knowledge.
VI. OF THE COMBINATION OF THE FEELING OF PLEASURE WITH THE CONCEPT OF
THE PURPOSIVENESS OF NATURE.
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