System of Transcendental Idealism

...nature laws into laws of intuition Intuition; "Anschauen," meaning a direct, immediate perception or viewing, referring here to the mind's way of "seeing" the world and of thought. The phenomena (the material) must completely disappear, and only the laws (the formal) remain. It is for this reason that the more the lawful character breaks through within nature itself, the more the veil vanishes; the phenomena themselves become more spiritual Original: "geistiger." In this philosophical context, this refers to becoming more mental or intellectual rather than religious., and finally cease altogether. 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 phenomena of magnetism, every material trace already disappears; and of the phenomena of gravitation—which even natural scientists believed could only be understood as an immediate spiritual influence—nothing remains but its law, the large-scale execution of which is the mechanism of celestial motions.

— The perfect theory of nature would be that by virtue of which all of nature is resolved into an intelligence. — The dead and unconscious products of nature are merely failed attempts by nature to reflect upon itself; however, so-called dead nature is generally an immature intelligence, and thus its intelligent character already glimmers through its phenomena, though still unconsciously. — Nature first reaches the highest goal of becoming a complete object to itself through the highest and final reflection, which is nothing other than man, or, more generally, that which we call reason,