For without this unity we should not
even possess reason, because we should have no school for reason,
and no cultivation through objects which afford the materials for
its conceptions. But teleological unity is a necessary unity, and
founded on the essence of the individual will itself. Hence this will,
which is the condition of the application of this unity in concreto,
must be so likewise. In this way the transcendental enlargement of our
rational cognition would be, not the cause, but merely the effect of
the practical teleology which pure reason imposes upon us.
Hence, also, we find in the history of human reason that, before the
moral conceptions were sufficiently purified and determined, and
before men had attained to a perception of the systematic unity of
ends according to these conceptions and from necessary principles, the
knowledge of nature, and even a considerable amount of intellectual
culture in many other sciences, could produce only rude and vague
conceptions of the Deity, sometimes even admitting of an astonishing
indifference with regard to this question altogether. But the more
enlarged treatment of moral ideas, which was rendered necessary by the
extreme pure moral law of our religion, awakened the interest, and
thereby quickened the perceptions of reason in relation to this
object.
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