be the death of natural philosophy:  the hylozoist endows matter with a property which conflicts with its nature, and the theist oversteps the boundary of possible experience.  Above all, the analogy of the products of organic nature with the products of human technique is destroyed by the fact that machines do not reproduce themselves and their parts cannot produce one another, while the organism organizes itself.

For our discursive understanding an interaction between the whole and the parts is completely incomprehensible.  We understand when the parts precede the whole (mechanically) or the representation of the whole precedes the parts (teleologically); but to think the whole itself (not the Idea thereof) as the ground of the parts, which is demanded by organic life, is impossible for us.  It would have been otherwise if an intuitive understanding had been bestowed upon us.  For a being possessing intellectual intuition the antithesis between possibility and actuality, between necessity and contingency, between mechanism and teleology, would disappear along with that between thought and intuition.  For such a being everything possible (all that it thinks) would be at the same time actual (present for intuition), and all that appears to us contingent—­intentionally selected from several possibilities and in order to an end—­would be necessary as well; with the whole would be given the parts corresponding thereto, and consequently natural mechanism and purposive connection would be identical, while for us, to whom the intuitive understanding is denied, the two divide.  Hence the teleological view is a mere form of human representation, a subjective principle.  We may not say that a mechanical origin of living beings is impossible, but only that we are unable to understand it.  If we knew how a blade of grass or a frog sprang from mechanical forces, we would also be in a position to produce them.

The antinomy of the teleological judgment—­thesis:  all production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws; antithesis:  some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws, but to judge them requires the causality of final causes—­is insoluble so long as both propositions are taken for constitutive principles; but it is soluble when they are taken as regulative principles or standpoints for judgment.  For it is in no wise contradictory, on the one hand, to continue the search for mechanical causes as far as this is in any way possible, and, on the other, clearly to recognize that, at last, this will still leave a remainder which we cannot make intelligible without calling to our aid the concept of ends.  Assuming that it were possible to carry the explanation of life from life, from ancestral organisms (for the generatio aequivoca is an absurd theory) so far that the whole organic world should represent one great family descended from one primitive form as