System of Transcendental Idealism

...therefore be added to the objective. — It is not contained within the concept of nature that there should also be an intelligent being that represents it. Nature, so it seems, would exist even if there were nothing there to represent it The author is using "represent" (vorstellen) in the philosophical sense of a mind perceiving or forming a mental image of the world.. The task can therefore also be expressed thus: How is the intelligent added to nature, or how does nature come to be represented?

This task assumes nature or the objective as the primary starting point. It is therefore, without doubt, the task of natural science, which does the same. — That natural science—even without knowing it—is actually approaching the resolution of that task can only be shown here briefly.

If all knowledge has, as it were, two poles which mutually presuppose and require one another, then they must seek each other in all sciences; there must therefore necessarily be two fundamental sciences, and it must be impossible to start from one pole without being driven toward the other. The necessary tendency of all natural science is therefore to move from nature toward the intelligent. This, and nothing else, lies at the heart of the effort to bring theory into natural phenomena. — The highest perfection of natural science would be the complete spiritualization; the process of turning material laws into laws of thought or mind (Vergeistigung) of all natural laws...