The Criticism of the Judgment-faculty is Kant's next step towards providing a completer philosophy. Ostensibly it owes its origin to the need of supplementing the treatment of Understanding and Reason by a discussion of Judgment, and of considering our emotional as well as our cognitive and volitional appreciations. What it really does is to minimise still further the gulf left between the intellect and nature--between the natural and the spiritual world. The intellect, said the first criticism, makes nature: it makes possible the general outlines of our conception of the world around us as a causally-connected system, in which a permanent being undergoes perpetual alteration, and manifests phenomena subject to mathematical conditions. Intellect, in short, has staked out the world which is the object of the practical man, and of his adviser the scientist. But there is another world--the world of beauty and sublimity--the world which art imitates and realises. The interpretation Kant gives to the aesthetic world is as follows. The fact of beauty is a witness to the presence in the mere copiousness of sensible existence of a sub-conscious symmetry or spirit of harmony which realises without compulsion and as if by free grace all the proportion and coherence which intellect requires. Nature itself has something which does the work that intellect was charged with, and does it with a subtle secret hand which does not suggest the artificer. The fact of sublimity, on the other hand, indicates the presence of an even greater spirit. For beauty may seem--from what has been said--to be only an unbought accrement to the commodities of life--facilitating the task of the practical intellect. But the sublime in nature speaks of something which is greater than human utilities and practical conveniences. It reveals a something which is in sympathy with our essential and higher self, and therefore stirs within us the keen rapture of the traveller who sees from afar his home in 'rocky Ithaca,' but a something which is cold to daily wants and vulgar satisfactions, and therefore strikes upon us a gelid awe.
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.