Kant’s solution of this antinomy is that both mechanism and teleology are only regulative principles. They tell us nothing of the ultimate nature of reality, except that we can explain much of it by regarding it as if it were a machine, and much by regarding it as if it were the field of purposive agency. Reality must be consistent with both these facts, but more we cannot say. The moral is that we should continue to treat them as regulative principles, and push each principle of explanation as far as it will go. Kant is here, as usual, the enemy alike of scientific and of theological dogmatism. He will not allow any limit to be set to the work of scientific investigation, and yet will not allow a principle of scientific method to be converted from an explanation of perceived facts into a theory of the universe. Besides mediating between the conflicting claims of mechanism and teleology, Kant also modifies the notion of teleology. When we think of reality as purposive, we do not necessarily think of it as having a definite purpose, as being subordinate, for example, to the well-being of man. The principle of purposiveness arises properly, he holds, from the contemplation of living things, from the perception of the difference between an organism and a machine. An organism is purposive in the sense in which a work of art is. In applying the principle we are trying to understand reality as though the relation of all the different things in it were like the relation of the parts of an organism or a picture. But this principle, like the principle of mechanism, does not carry us further than the facts we have examined, for an organism or a work of art can only be understood by study of the individual relations of all its parts. We can never know the universe as an organism, for we can never know all its parts. We can understand and put together more and more of them, but we never come to the end. The third _Critique_, then, enforces the lesson of the first, that knowledge is the work of individual finite minds, trying to understand elements in a whole that transcends the limits of their experience, pushing back the spatial and temporal limits which confine each individual, but never removing them altogether. The critical philosophy teaches the impossibility of absolute knowledge, but it does so not by suggesting general scepticism of all knowledge, but by enforcing the validity of scientific knowledge within its own limits. *BIBLIOGRAPHY* *TRANSLATIONS* There are two accessible translations of the _Critique of Pure Reason_--Meiklejohn (Bell & Co.) and Max Müller (Macmillan). Kant’s ethical writings have been translated by Abbott (Longmans). There is a translation of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ by Bernard (Macmillan), and of the first part of it, the _Critique of Æsthetic Judgment_, by Meredith (Clarendon Press). This last book has introductory essays and notes.