Critique of Judgment
In the late 17th-century, [[Thomas Burnet]] referred to "a multitude of pieces aptly joyn'd" to argue against the [[eternity]] of life. In the early 18th century, [[Nicolas Malebranche]] wrote "An organized body contains an infinity of parts that mutually depend upon one another in relation to particular ends, all of which must be actually formed in order to work as a whole", arguing in favor of [[preformation]], rather than [[epigenesis (biology)|epigenesis]], of the individual; and a similar argument about the origins of the individual was made by other 18th-century students of natural history. In his 1790 book, "[[The Critique of Judgment#Teleology|The Critique of Judgment]]", [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] is said by Guyer to argue that "we cannot conceive how a whole that comes into being only gradually from its parts can nevertheless be the cause of the properties of those parts".