Immanuel Kant Quotes on Nature
Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) — the third Critique — undertakes to bridge the chasm the first two had opened between the deterministic mechanical nature theoretical reason describes and the moral law practical reason commands. The teleological judgment of nature treats organic systems as if they were the products of design, not because we can know them to be so but because reflective judgment cannot otherwise grasp them as systematic wholes. The aesthetic judgment of natural beauty and the sublime supplies a parallel bridge: the disinterested pleasure of beauty hints at a supersensible substrate of nature in harmony with the human cognitive faculties, and the sublime confronts that substrate as the ground of our own moral vocation.
Quotes
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“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. -
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Proposition 6. | Variant translations: Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built. | From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned. | Never a straight thing was made from the crooked timber of man. -
Attributed to Immanuel Kant:
“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.”
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“Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.”
A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken , p. 1017 -
“Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology , and first establishes a Theology ; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology , which is incapable of any definite concept.”
Immanuel Kant , Kant's Critique of Judgment (1892) Tr. J.H. Bernard