152 struggling with the worldconverted a view of the focus of human and divine agency into a cate-
gorical division of reality.
Th e conversion of epistemology and anthropology into ontology is
unjustifi ed: we cannot read a universal division of reality off of a cir-
cumstantial view of the peculiarities of our cognitive or social experi-
ence. What the doctrine of the two regimes does in eff ect, reduced to its
most rudimentary terms, is to say, illegitimately, that the world is di-
vided into two parts: we and the rest. Th e variants of the doctrine diff er
in how they characterize this we as well as how they view the way in
which the we is cut off from the rest.
Such diff erences reveal another type of arbitrariness in the teaching
of the two regimes. It is illegitimate to infer a comprehensive view of
discontinuities in the world from an understanding of our powers and
their limits. Such an anthropocentric ontology may say something about
us, but it has little or nothing to say about the world. Moreover, each
view of our powers and their limits is no more than a disputed concep-
tion. One of the sources of the ongoing contest is that we can develop
our powers, most notably through science and technology.
Consider again the image of the man who sees up to a hundred me-
ters and imagines that the world is divided into two parts: the part that
he can perceive and the part lying beyond his fi eld of vision. In his self-
regarding delusion, he confuses his experience with the world, and
supposes that reality diff ers before and aft er the hundred- meter line.
Th en, however, he walks a hundred meters forward or devises a tele-
scope and fi nds that he was mistaken.
Take, as an example, the issue of causation, which played an exem-
plary role in the development of the Kantian wave of the doctrine of the
two regimes. Kant regards the idea of causality as an indispensable
presupposition of the human mind. In making sense of the world, we
cannot avoid relying on that concept. However, our real or supposed
need of it tells us nothing about the structure of the world apart from
us, only about the world in relation to humanity.
Th e analysis of causation in the Critique of Pure Reason makes clear
that Kant has in mind, as many have had since his day, the tradition of
physics established by Galileo and Newton. Behind our causal explana-
tions there stand, as warrants, according to this tradition, the immu-
table laws of nature. Yet Kant treats this view of cause as part of our