 Kant was not so sure. By the late 18th century, the theory of inorganic nature, thanks to Laplace, Black, Priestley, Franklin, and other chemists and electricians was flourishing, but so too was the study of physiology, embryology, and natural history, thanks especially to Bourguet, Boerhaave, Haller, and Buffon. Newtonian forces acting over a distance were no longer seen as incompatible with a commitment to mechanism, opening the door to the supposition of vital forces that might act in a lawlike fashion. Preformation was no longer a credible doctrine; the possibility of self-assembling “organic molecules,” working according to “organic mechanism,” was much discussed. Epigenesis reduced the need for a divine creator. Kant addresses the ensuing intellectual-theological crisis in the Critique of Judgment, a two-part essay dealing with beauty, beautiful forms in nature, and forms in nature generally. He tries to show that we are caught up in an antinomy. We are strongly disposed to view visible nature as a unity in which a single set of mechanical forces operates, not to divide it into an inorganic realm that came to be by the forces inherent in nature and an organic realm of plants and animals evidencing design and supernatural creation. Yet we cannot envision explaining generation or organic growth mechanistically. The solution to the dilemma is to adopt teleology as a regulative principle. We should not positively declare that organic beings could not have arisen and cannot reproduce themselves from the forces of nature, or that God must have a hand in their genesis; nevertheless, in investigating them, we look for the function and interrelation of parts, as though they were designed and built intelligently (5: 416ff). The claim that the parts of a living creature are organized in infinitum as Leibniz supposed is however, “something that cannot be thought at all.” (KRV A 526/B 554).