System of Transcendental Idealism

...natural laws into laws of intuition Original: "Anschauen." In this philosophical context, "intuition" refers to the mind's immediate perception or "looking upon" an object. and of thought. The phenomena (the material) must completely disappear, and only the laws (the formal) remain. This is why the more that lawfulness emerges within nature itself, the more the veil disappears; the phenomena themselves become more spiritual The German "geistiger" can mean "spiritual," "mental," or "intellectual," referring to the realm of the mind rather than physical matter., and finally cease entirely. Optical phenomena are nothing other than a geometry whose lines are drawn by light, and this light itself is already of an ambiguous materiality. In the manifestations of magnetism, every material trace already disappears; and of the phenomena of gravitation—which even natural scientists believed they could only understand as a direct spiritual influence—nothing remains but its law, whose execution on a grand scale is the mechanism of celestial motions. — The perfect theory of nature would be that by virtue of which all of nature dissolved into an intelligence. — The dead and unconscious products of nature are merely failed attempts by nature to reflect upon itself; so-called dead nature, however, is generally an immature intelligence, which is why, though still unconscious, an intelligent character already shines through its phenomena. — The highest goal—to become a complete object to itself—nature only reaches through the highest and final reflection, which is nothing other than man, or more generally, what we call reason; the capacity for conscious, logical, and self-reflective thought (Vernunft),