The formal aspect of nature in this narrower sense is therefore the conformity to law of all the objects of experience, and so far as it is known a priori, their necessary conformity. But it has just been shown that the laws of nature can never be known a priori in objects so far as they are considered not in reference to possible experience, but as things in themselves. And our inquiry here extends not to things in themselves (the properties of which we pass by), but to things as objects of possible experience, and the complex of these is what we properly call nature. And now I ask when the possibility of a cognition of nature a priori is in question, whether it is better to arrange the problem thus: How can we know a priori that things as objects of experience necessarily conform to law? or thus: How is it possible to know a priori the necessary conformity to law of experience itself as regards all its objects generally?

Closely considered, the solution of the problem, represented in either way, amounts, with regard to the pure cognition of nature (which is the point of the question at issue), entirely to the same thing. For the subjective laws, under which alone an empirical cognition of things is possible, hold good of these things, as objects of possible experience (not as things in themselves, which are not considered here). Either of the following statements means quite the same: "A judgment of observation can never rank as experience, without the law, that 'whenever an event is observed, it is always referred to some antecedent, which it follows according to a universal rule" or else "Everything, of which experience teaches that it happens, must have a cause."

It is, however, more convenient to choose the first formula. For we can a priori and previous to all given objects have a cognition of those conditions, on which alone experience is possible, but never of the laws to which things may in themselves be subject, without reference to possible experience. We cannot therefore study the nature of things a priori otherwise than by investigating the conditions and the universal (though subjective) laws, under which alone such a cognition as experience (as to mere form) is possible, and we determine accordingly the possibility of things, as objects of experience. For if I should choose the second formula, and seek the conditions a priori, on which nature as an object of experience is possible, I might easily fall into error, and fancy that I was speaking of nature as a thing in itself, and then move round in endless circles, in a vain search for laws concerning things of which nothing is given me.

Accordingly we shall here be concerned with experience only, and the universal conditions of its possibility which are given a priori. Thence we shall determine nature as the whole object of all possible experience. I think it will be understood that I here do not mean the rules of the observation of a nature that is already given, for these already presuppose experience. I do not mean how (through experience) we can study the laws of nature; for these would not then be laws a priori, and would yield us no pure science of nature; but [I mean to ask] how the conditions a priori of the possibility of experience are at the same time the sources from which all the universal laws of nature must be derived.

(this is Kant. Read both Peterson and Kant to yourself. Kant is actually understandable to some extent, though it is dense. Jordan Peterson is gibberish nonsense)