Another world yet remains, which appeals neither to our utilitarian science, nor to our higher sentiments of artistic perfection. This is the world as the home of organic life, and perhaps itself an organism. The organism is apt to be a poser for the ordinary categories of mechanical science. Here the part contains the whole, not less than the whole contains the part: the cause is an effect, as well as cause, of its effect. One thing is in another, and the other in it: 'the present is charged with the past, and pregnant of the future,'--as the great founder of modern teleology often said. In the plant and the animal the natural world has to a certain degree reached an ideal unity which is also real. Reason--the syllogism--is here not merely introduced from without, as when man manipulates, but is the immanent law of a natural life,--the end working out itself by its own means and act. The fact admitted in these creatures suggests extending the conception of organism (or teleology) to nature as a whole. From this point of view Nature may almost be said to have a history--because it is almost conceived as having one abiding self which in apparent unconsciousness wonderfully simulates the purposive adaptation of conscious life. The older vulgar teleology was somewhat mechanical: it regarded the natural world outside of--or as it said, below--man as having no end of its own, but in its series subserving man's commodities. In the teleology of Kant the supreme end is still in a way man, and still there is a little of the mechanical about it: but it is not to promote man's happiness, understood as that probably _must_ be in a selfish sense, but to produce in him the worthiest agent to carry on to its highest the rational process of development. The struggles and pains of natural existence, the laws of life, the competition of rivals, are all means in the hands of nature to produce an autonomous being. Kant says, a moral agent. But a moral agent has been already explained as an intelligence certified unto truth and a self-centred will whose law is the law of the cosmos,--whose plan of life, if we so put of it, is essentially a concentration in miniature and in individuality of the system ordained by the all-present God. It is true that Kant, after all these soarings, checks enthusiasm by the words 'not that we can know this, or that it is so: but our nature with unmistakable tendency bids us act _as if_ it were so. Logic will hardly justify it--but life seems to demand it.' And some have replied: 'let us trust the larger hope.' [Footnote 1: Hegel's _Werke_, vol. i. p. 140.] [Footnote 2: Kant from 1762 onwards continues to insist on the necessity for philosophy taking up an analytic and critical attitude to current conceptions: see especially _Werke,_ i. 95 and 292.] [Footnote 3: Foundation of Metaph. of Eth. (_Werke_, viii. 82, 89): 'Dieses Sollen ist eigentlich ein Wollen.'] CHAPTER XI. SYNTHESIS AND RECONSTRUCTION: FICHTE.