Kant distinguishes between two possible forms of reason, the intellectus archetypus and the intellectus ectypus. By the first he means a reason ‘which being, not like ours, discursive, but intuitive, proceeds from the synthetic universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, that is, from the whole to the parts’. According to Kant, such a reason lies outside human possibilities. In contrast to it, the intellectus ectypus peculiar to man is restricted to taking in through the senses the single details of the world as such; with these it can certainly construct pictures of their totalities, but these pictures never have more than a hypothetical character and can claim no reality for themselves. Above all, it is not given to such a thinking to think ‘wholes’ in such a way that through an act of thought alone the single items contained in them can be conceived as parts springing from them by necessity. (To illustrate this, we may say that, according to Kant, we can certainly comprehend the parts of an organism, say of a plant, and out of its components make a picture of the plant as a whole; but we are not in a position to think that ‘whole’ of the plant which conditions the existence of its organism and brings forth its parts by necessity.) Kant expresses this in the following way: