struggling with the world 153mental constitution instead of regarding it as a distinctive and revisable
approach to the workings of nature.
Causality may be a primitive feature of nature rather than just a pre-
supposition of the human mind. Its relation to the laws, symmetries,
and supposed constants of nature may be very diff erent from what that
tradition of physics imagines it to be. Th ere may be states of nature,
such as those prevailing at the formative moments of the present uni-
verse, in which the distinction between laws of nature and the states of
aff airs that they govern did not hold. In such states, causal connections
may have ceased to exhibit, or not yet begun to exhibit, the recurrent,
law- like form that they ordinarily display in the observed universe.
Nothing in the constitution of the human mind prevents us from
thinking about causal connections in ways antagonistic to those that
Kant wrongly supposed to be indispensable to thought. Moreover, the
revision of our views need not be a matter of idle philosophical specu-
lation; it may be driven by the advance of our insight into the workings
of nature, and subject to the empirical challenges that discipline natu-
ral science.
What is true about our causal ideas is true as well about any of the con-
ceptions that we may be tempted to attribute to our natural constitution.
Th e signifi cance of this remark outreaches its application to the Kantian
form of the doctrine of the two regimes. Th e broader point is that we are
not entitled to convert a view of our powers and limitations into a concep-
tion of the world: fi rst, because the world exists apart from us, and we
form only a minute portion of it; second, because our ideas about who we
are and what we can do are forever subject to contest; and, third, because
our powers, including our powers of discovery and understanding, can
develop thanks to science, equipped by its child, technology.
Th e unwarranted projection of a local and transitory view of our
powers and limits into the drawing of an imaginary frontier between
two orders of reality— the non- human and the human— has, as its cor-
ollary, the view that we cannot think of ourselves in thoroughgoing
naturalistic terms. However, we are natural beings who live and die in a
natural world.
It is true that we know the structures of society and thought that we
collectively create from within, as their creators, in a manner in which
we cannot hope to know the phenomena of nature. It is also true that