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TELEOLOGY. 41 1 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 con- stitutive 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 /or 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 can- not make intelligible without callingto our aid the concept of ends. Assuming that it were possible to carry the explana- tion of life from life, from ancestral organisms (for the generatio ceqiiivoca is an absurd theory) so far that the whole organic world should represent one great family descended from one primitive form as the common mother, even then the concept of final causes would only be pushed further back, not eliminated : the origin of the first organization will always resist mechanical explanation. Besides this mission of putting limits to causal derivation and of filling the gap in knowledge by a necessary, although subjective, way of looking at things, the Idea of ends has still another, the direct promotion of knowledge from efficient causes through the discovery of new causal problems. Thus, for example, physiology owes the impulse to the discovery of previously unnoticed mechanical connections (cf. also p. 382 note) to the question concerning the purpose of organs. As doctrines mechanism and teleology are irreconcilable and impossible ; as rules or maxims of inquiry they are compatible, and the one as indispensable as the other. After the problem of life, which is insoluble by means of the mechanical explanation, has necessitated the application of the concept of ends, the teleological principle must, at least by way of experiment, be extended to the whole of nature. This consideration culminates in the position