III. CRITICK OF THE FACULTY OF JUDGMENT.—The conception of this science Kant gives in the following manner. The two faculties of the human mind hitherto considered were the faculty of knowledge and that of desire. It was proved in the Critick of pure Reason, that the understanding only as faculty of knowledge included constitutive principles apriori; and it was shown in the Critick of Practical Reason, that the reason possesses constitutive principles apriori, simply in reference to the faculty of desire. Whether now the _faculty of judgment_, as the middle link between understanding and reason, can take its object—the feeling of pleasure and pain as the middle link between the faculty of knowledge and that of desire—and furnish it apriori with principles which shall be for themselves constitutive and not simply regulative: this is the point upon which the Critick of the Faculty of Judgment has to turn.
The faculty of judgment is the middle link between the understanding as the faculty of conceptions, and the reason as the faculty of principles. In this position it has the following functions: The speculative reason had taught us to consider the world only according to natural laws; the practical reason had inferred for us a moral world, in which every thing is determined through freedom. There was thus a gulf between the kingdom of nature and that of freedom, which could not be passed unless the faculty of judgment should furnish a conception which should unite the two sides. That it is entitled to do this lies in the very conception of the faculty of judgment. Since it is the faculty of conceiving the particular as contained under the universal, it thus refers the empirical manifoldness of nature to a supersensible, transcendental principle, which embraces in itself the ground for the unity of the manifold. The object of the faculty of judgment is, therefore, the conception of _design_ in nature; for the evidence of this points to that supersensible unity which contains the ground for the actuality of an object. And since all design and every actualization of an end is connected with pleasure, we may farther explain the faculty of judgment by saying, that it contains the laws for the feeling of pleasure and pain.