 It is important to Kant that a third faculty independent of both understanding and reason provides this mediating perspective, because he holds that we do not have adequate theoretical grounds for attributing objective teleology to nature itself, and yet regarding nature as teleological solely on moral grounds would only heighten the disconnect between our scientific and moral ways of viewing the world. Theoretical grounds do not justify us in attributing objective teleology to nature, because it is not a condition of self-consciousness that our understanding construct experience in accordance with the concept of teleology, which is not among Kant’s categories or the principles of pure understanding that ground the fundamental laws of nature. That is why his theoretical philosophy licenses us only in attributing mechanical causation to nature itself. To this limited extent, Kant is sympathetic to the dominant strain in modern philosophy that banishes final causes from nature and instead treats nature as nothing but matter in motion, which can be fully described mathematically. But Kant wants somehow to reconcile this mechanistic view of nature with a conception of human agency that is essentially teleological. As we saw in the previous section, Kant holds that every human action has an end and that the sum of all moral duties is to promote the highest good. It is essential to Kant’s approach, however, to maintain the autonomy of both understanding (in nature) and reason (in morality), without allowing either to encroach on the other’s domain, and yet to harmonize them in a single system. This harmony can be orchestrated only from an independent standpoint, from which we do not judge how nature is constituted objectively (that is the job of understanding) or how the world ought to be (the job of reason), but from which we merely regulate or reflect on our cognition in a way that enables us to regard it as systematically unified. According to Kant, this is the task of reflecting judgment, whose a priori principle is to regard nature as purposive or teleological, “but only as a regulative principle of the faculty of cognition” (5:197).