Could our cognitive faculties rest content with this maxim of the reflective judgement it would be impossible for them to conceive of the production of these things in any other fashion than by attributing them to a cause working by design, to a Being which would be productive in a way analogous to the causality of intelligence. Natural science, however, needs not merely reflective but determinant principles which alone can inform us of the possibility of finding the ultimate explanation of the world of organisms in a causal combination for which an understanding is not explicitly assumed, since the principle of purposes does not make the mode of origination of organic beings any more comprehensible. And then, in a passage remarkable for its prophetic insight, Kant proceeds to show how this might be. This ‘analogy of forms’, he says, ‘which with all their difference seem to have been produced according to a common original type, strengthens our suspicion of an actual relationship between them in their production from a common parent, through the gradual approximation of one genus to another--from those in which the principle of purposes seems to be best authenticated, that is from man down to the polype, and again from this down to mosses and lichens, and finally to the lowest stage of nature noticeable by us, namely, crude matter’. And so the whole technic of nature, which is so incomprehensible to us in organized beings that we believe ourselves compelled to think a different principle for it, seems to be derived from matter and its powers according to mechanical laws like those by which it operates in the formation of crystals. A purposiveness must, however, be attributed even to the crude matter, otherwise it would not be possible to think the purposive form of animals and plants. Although there are doubtless in the _Critique_ many obscurities and inconsistencies, to which we cannot allude now, the general meaning of Kant’s reflections upon organisms is perfectly clear. He who would ‘complete the perfect round’ of his knowledge must think not only in beginnings but in ends. The end in the case of a living being is apparently plain--it is the maintenance and reproduction of its form; the end in the case of the cosmic process is to be sought in the ethical, or, in Kantian phraseology, the ‘practical’ concept of the freedom of the moral consciousness of man.