(in which both powers co-operate toward a common goal)—­then the source of its laws is evidently to be sought in that faculty which mediates alike between understanding and reason and between knowing and feeling:  in Judgment, as the higher faculty of feeling.  Judgment, in the general sense, is the faculty of thinking a particular as contained in a universal, and exercises a twofold function:  as “determinant” judgment it subsumes the particular under a given universal (a law), as “reflective” it seeks the universal for a given particular.  Since the former coincides with the understanding, we are here concerned only with the reflective judgment, judgment in the narrower sense, which does not cognize objects, but judges them, and this according to the principle of purposiveness.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The universal laws springing from the understanding, to which every nature must conform to become an object of experience for us, determine nothing concerning the particular form of the given reality; we cannot deduce the special laws of nature from them.  Nevertheless the nature of our cognitive faculty does not allow us to accept the empirical manifoldness of our world as contingent, but impels us to regard it as purposive or adapted to our knowledge, and to look upon these special laws as if an intelligence had given them in order to make a system of experience possible.]

This, in turn, is of two kinds.  An object is really or objectively purposive (perfect) when it corresponds to its nature or its determination, formally or subjectively purposive (beautiful) when it is conformed to the nature of our cognitive faculty.  The perception of purpose is always accompanied by a feeling of pleasure; in the first case, where the pleasure is based on a concept of the object, it is a logical satisfaction, in the second, where it springs only from the harmony of the object with our cognitive powers, aesthetic satisfaction.  The objects of the teleological and the aesthetic judgment, the purposive and the beautiful products of nature and art, constitute the desired intermediate field between nature and freedom; and here again the critical question comes up, How, in relation to these, synthetic judgments a priori are possible?

%(a) Esthetic Judgment.%—­The formula holds of Kant’s aesthetics as well as of his theoretical and practical philosophy, that his aim is to overcome the opposition between the empirical and the rationalistic theories, and to find a middle course of his own between the two extremes.  Neither Burke nor Baumgarten satisfied him.  The English aesthetics was sensational, the German, i.e., that of the Wolffian school, rationalistic.  The former identified the beautiful with the agreeable, the latter identified it with the perfect or with the conformity of the object to its concept; in the one case, aesthetic appreciation is treated as sensuous pleasure, in the other, it is treated as a lower, confused kind of knowledge,