Section Three

RECENT GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

In the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the revolution to which in Germany mind has in these latter days advanced, was formally thought out and expressed; the sequence of these philosophies shows the course which thought has taken. In this great epoch of the world’s history, whose inmost essence is laid hold of in the philosophy of history, two nations only have played a part, the German and the French, and this in spite of their absolute opposition, or rather because they are so opposite. The other nations have taken no real inward part in the same, although politically they have indeed so done, both through their governments and their people. In Germany this principle has burst forth as thought, spirit, Notion; in France, in the form of actuality. In Germany, what there is of actuality comes to us as a force of external circumstances, and as a reaction against the same. The task of modern German philosophy is, however, summed up in taking as its object the unity of thought and Being, which is the fundamental idea of philosophy generally, and comprehending it, that is, in laying hold of the inmost significance of necessity, the Notion (supra, p. 360). The philosophy of Kant sets forth, in the first place, the formal aspect of the task, but it has the abstract absoluteness of reason in self-consciousness as its sole result, and, in one respect, it carried with it a certain character of shallowness and want of vigour, in which an attitude of criticism and negativity is retained, and which, as far as any positive element is concerned, adheres to the facts of consciousness and to mere conjecture, while it renounces thought and returns to feeling. On the other hand, however, there sprang from this the philosophy of Fichte, which speculatively grasps the essence of self-consciousness as concrete egoism, but which does not reach beyond this subjective form pertaining to the absolute. From it again comes the philosophy of Schelling, which subsequently rejects Fichte’s teaching and sets forth the Idea of the Absolute, the truth in and for itself.

A. JACOBI.

In connection with Kant we must here begin by speaking of Jacobi, whose philosophy is contemporaneous with that of Kant; in both of these the advance beyond the preceding period is very evident. The result in the two cases is much the same, although both the starting point and the method of progression are somewhat different. In Jacobi’s case the stimulus was given mainly by French philosophy, with which he was very conversant, and also by German metaphysics, while Kant began rather from the English side, that is, from the scepticism of Hume. Jacobi, in that negative attitude which he preserved as well as Kant, kept before him the objective aspect of the method of knowledge, and specially considered it, for he declared knowledge to be in its content incapable of recognizing the Absolute: the truth must be concrete, present, but not finite. Kant does not consider the content, but took the view of knowledge being subjective; and for this reason he declared it to be incapable of recognizing absolute existence. To Kant knowledge is thus a knowledge of phenomena only, not because the categories are merely limited and finite, but because they are subjective. To Jacobi, on the other hand, the chief point is that the categories are not merely subjective, but that they themselves are conditioned. This is an essential difference between the two points of view, even if they both arrive at the same result.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, born at Düsseldorf in 1743, held office first in the Duchy of Berg, and then in Bavaria. He studied in Geneva and Paris, associating in the former place with Bonnet and in the latter with Diderot. Jacobi was a man of the highest character and culture. He was long occupied with State affairs, and in Düsseldorf he held a public office which was connected with the administration of the finance department in the State. At the time of the French Revolution he was obliged to retire. As a Bavarian official he went to Munich, there became President of the Academy of Sciences in 1804, which office he, however, resigned in 1812; for in the Napoleonic period Protestants were decried as demagogues. He lived at Munich till the end of his life, and died at the same place on the 10th of March, 1819.

In the year 1785, Jacobi published Letters on Spinoza, which were written in 1783, on the occasion of the dispute with Mendelssohn above-mentioned (p. 406); for in none of his writings did Jacobi develop his philosophy systematically, he set it forth in letters only. When Mendelssohn wished to write a life of Lessing, Jacobi sent to ask him if he knew that “Lessing was a Spinozist” (Jacobi’s Werke, Vol. IV. Sec. 1, pp. 39, 40). Mendelssohn was displeased at this, and it was the occasion of the correspondence. In the course of the dispute it was made evident that those who held themselves to be professed philosophers and possessed of a monopoly of Lessing’s friendship, such as Nicolai, Mendelssohn, &c., knew nothing about Spinozism; not only was there manifested in them the superficial character of their philosophic insight, but ignorance as well; with Mendelssohn, for instance, this was shown respecting even the outward history of the Spinozistic philosophy, and much more regarding the inward (Jacobi’s Werke, Vol. IV. Sec. 1, p. 91). That Jacobi asserted Lessing to be a Spinozist, and gave a high place to the French—this serious statement came to these good men as a thunderbolt from the blue. They—the self-satisfied, self-possessed, superior persons—were quite surprised that he also made pretensions to knowledge, and of such a “dead dog” as Spinoza (ibidem, p. 68). Explanations followed upon this, in which Jacobi further developed his philosophic views.

Mendelssohn is directly opposed to Jacobi, for Mendelssohn took his stand on cognition, placed true existence immediately in thought and conception, and maintained: “What I cannot think as true does not trouble me as doubt. A question which I do not understand, I cannot answer, it is for me as good as no question at all.” He continued to argue on these same lines. His proof of the existence of God thus carries with it this necessity of thought, viz. that actuality must plainly be in thought, and a thinker must be presupposed, or the possibility of the actual is in the thinker. “What no thinking Being conceives as possible is not possible, and what is thought by no thinking creature as actual cannot be actual in fact. If we take away from anything whatsoever the conception formed by a thinking Being that that thing is possible or actual, the thing itself is done away with.” The Notion of the thing is thus to man the essence of the same. “No finite Being can think the actuality of a thing in its perfection as actual, and still less can he perceive the possibility and actuality of all present things. There must thus be a thinking Being or an understanding which in the most perfect way thinks the content of all possibilities as possible, and the content of all actualities as actual; i.e. there must be an infinite understanding, and this is God.” Here on the one hand we see a unity of thought and Being, on the other the absolute unity as infinite understanding—the former is the self-consciousness which is apprehended as finite merely. Actuality, Being, has its possibility in thought, or its possibility is thought; it is not a process from possibility to actuality, for the possibility remains at home in the actuality.

Jacobi maintains against these demands of thought—and this in one view is the chief thought in his philosophy—that every method of their demonstration leads to fatalism, atheism, and Spinozism, and presents God as derived and founded upon something else; for comprehending Him signifies demonstrating His dependence. Jacobi thus asserts that mediate knowledge consists in giving a cause of something which has in its turn a finite effect, and so on; so that a knowledge such as this can all through relate to the finite only.

Jacobi further states upon this subject, in the first place, that “Reason”—later on when he distinguished reason and understanding (of which more hereafter), he altered it to understanding—“can never bring to light more than the conditions of what is conditioned, natural laws and mechanism. We comprehend a thing when we can deduce it from its proximate causes,” and not from the remoter causes; the most remote and quite universal cause is always God. “Or” we know the thing if we “perceive its immediate conditions as they come in due succession. Thus, for instance, we comprehend a circle when we can clearly represent to ourselves the mechanism of its origination or its physical conditions; we know the syllogistic formulæ when we have actually come to know the laws to which the human understanding is subject in judgment and conclusion, its physical nature and its mechanism. For this reason we have no conceptions of qualities as such, but only intuitions. Even of our present existence we have a feeling only, but no conceptions. Genuine conceptions we have merely of figure, number, position, movement and the forms of thought; qualities are known and understood, if they are traced back to these and objectively annulled.” This is undoubtedly really finite knowledge, which is to give the determinate conditions of anything determinate, to demonstrate it as resulting from another cause, in such a way that each condition is again conditioned and finite. Jacobi continues: “The business of reason is really progressive union and connection, and its speculative business is union and connection in accordance with the known laws of necessity, i.e. of identity. Everything that reason can bring forth by means of analysis, combination, judgment, conclusion, and re-conception, consists in nothing but things of nature” (i.e. finite things), “and reason itself, as a limited existence, belongs to these things. But the whole of nature, the sum of all conditioned existence, cannot reveal more to the investigating understanding than what is contained in it, namely, manifold existence, changes, a succession of forms” (the conditioned), “and not an actual beginning” (of the world), “nor a real principle of any objective existence.”

But Jacobi in the second place here accepts reason in a wider sense and says: “If we understand by reason the principle of knowledge generally, it is the mind from which the whole living nature of man is constituted; through it man arises; he is a form which it has adopted.” With this Jacobi’s view of the attempt to know the unconditioned is connected. “I take the whole human being, and find that his consciousness is composed of two original conceptions, the conceptions of the conditioned and the unconditioned. Both are inseparably bound up with one another, and yet in such a way that the conception of the conditioned presupposes the conception of the unconditioned, and can be given in this alone. We are just as certain of its existence as we are of our own conditioned existence, or even more so. Since our conditioned existence rests on an infinitude of mediations, there is opened up to our investigation a vast field which, for the sake of our preservation even, we are forced to work upon.” It would, however, be quite another thing to wish to know the unconditioned apart from this practical end. However Jacobi here remarks, “To try to discover the conditions of the unconditioned, to find a possibility for absolute necessity, and to construct this last in order to be able to comprehend it, is what we undertake when we endeavour to make nature an existence comprehensible to us, i.e. a merely natural existence, and to bring the mechanism of the principle of mechanism into the light of day. For if everything which can be said to arise and be present in a way comprehensible to us, must arise and be present in a conditioned way, we remain, so long as we continue to comprehend, in a chain of conditioned conditions. Where this chain breaks off, we cease to comprehend, and there the connection which we call nature likewise ceases. The conception of the possibility of the outward existence of nature would thus be the conception of an absolute beginning or origin of nature; it would be the conception of the unconditioned itself in so far as it is a conditioning of nature not naturally connected, i.e. a conditioning of nature unconnected and unconditioned for us. Now should a conception of what is thus unconditioned and unconnected, and consequently supernatural, be possible, the unconditioned must cease to be unconditioned, it must itself receive conditions; and absolute necessity must commence to be possibility in order that it may allow itself to be constructed.” This is contradictory.

Jacobi then passes on from this point to the second of his main propositions, “The unconditioned is called the supernatural. Now since everything which lies outside the connection of what is conditioned, of what is naturally mediated, also lies outside the sphere of our clear and certain knowledge, and cannot be understood through conceptions, the supernatural cannot be accepted in any other way by us than that in which it is given to us—namely as a fact. It is! This supernatural, this essence of all essence, all tongues join in proclaiming to be God.” God as the universal, the true, is here taken in the sense of a spiritual generally, in the sense of power, wisdom, &c. That God is, however, is to Jacobi not absolutely true; for to knowledge pertains His objective absolute existence, but He cannot be said to be known. It is thus merely a fact of my consciousness that God exists independently apart from my consciousness; this, however, is itself maintained through my consciousness; the subjective attitude of thought is thus to Jacobi the element of most importance. The consciousness of God, which is in our consciousness, is, however, of such a nature that along with the thought of God we have immediately associated the fact that He is. The existence of the supernatural and supersensuous, to which the thought of man regarding the natural and finite passes on, is just as certain to Jacobi as he is himself. This certainty is identical with his self-consciousness; as certainly as I am, so certainly is God (Jacobi’s Werke, Vol. III. p. 35). Since he thus passes back into self-consciousness, the unconditioned is only for us in an immediate way; this immediate knowledge Jacobi calls Faith, inward revelation (Werke, Vol. II. pp. 3, 4); to this appeal can be made in man. God, the absolute, the unconditioned, cannot, according to Jacobi, be proved. For proof, comprehension, means to discover conditions for something, to derive it from conditions; but a derived absolute, God, &c., would thus not be absolute at all, would not be unconditioned, would not be God (Jacobi’s Werke, Vol. III. p. 7). This immediate knowledge of God is then the point which is maintained in the philosophy of Jacobi. The faith of Kant and of Jacobi are, however, different. To Kant it is a postulate of reason, it is the demand for the solution of the contradiction between the world and goodness; to Jacobi it is represented on its own account as immediate knowledge.

Everything which has been written upon God since Jacobi’s time, by philosophers such as Fries and by theologians, rests on this conception of immediate intellectual knowledge, and men even call this revelation, though in another sense than the revelation of theology. Revelation as immediate knowledge is in ourselves, while the Church holds revelation to be something imparted from without. In the theological sense, faith is faith in something which is given to us through teaching. It is a sort of deception when faith and revelation are spoken of and represented as if faith and revelation in the theological sense were here in question; for the sense in which they are used, and which may be termed philosophic, is quite a different one, however pious an air may be assumed in using the terms. This is Jacobi’s standpoint, and whatever is by philosophers and theologians said against it, this teaching is eagerly accepted and disseminated. And nowhere is there anything to be found but reflections originating from Jacobi, whereby immediate knowledge is opposed to philosophic knowledge and to reason; and people speak of reason, philosophy, &c., as a blind man speaks of colours. It is, indeed, allowed that a man cannot make shoes unless he is a shoemaker, even although he have the measure and foot, and also the hands. But when Philosophy is concerned, immediate knowledge signifies that every man as he walks and stands is a philosopher, that he can dogmatize as he chooses, and that he is completely acquainted with Philosophy.

By reason, however, mediate knowledge merely is on the one hand understood, and on the other the intellectual perception which speaks of facts (supra, pp. 413-415). In this respect it is true that reason is the knowledge and revelation of absolute truth, since the understanding is the revelation of the finite (Jacobi’s Werke, Vol. II. pp. 8-14, 101). “We maintained that two different powers of perception in man have to be accepted: a power of perception through visible and tangible and consequently corporeal organs of perception, and another kind of power, viz. through an invisible organ which in no way represents itself to the outward senses, and whose existence is made known to us through feeling alone. This organ, a spiritual eye for spiritual objects, has been called by men—generally speaking—reason. He whom the pure feelings of the beautiful and good, of admiration and love, of respect and awe, do not convince that in and with these feelings he perceives something to be present which is independent of them, and which is unattainable by the outward senses or by an understanding directed upon their perceptions alone—such an one cannot be argued with” (Jacobi’s Werke, Vol. II. pp. 74, 76). But by faith Jacobi likewise understands all that has immediacy of Being for me: “Through faith we know that we have a body, we become aware of other actual things, and that indeed with the same certainty with which we are aware of ourselves. We obtain all conceptions through the qualities which we receive and accept, and there is no other way of attaining real knowledge; for reason, when it begets objects, begets phantoms of the brain. Thus we have a revelation of nature.” Hence the expression faith, which had a deep significance in religion, is made use of for different contents of every kind; this in our own time is the point of view most commonly adopted.

Jacobi here brings faith into opposition with thought. Let us compare the two, and discover whether they are separated by so great a chasm as those who thus oppose them think. On the one hand absolute existence is to faith immediate; believing consciousness feels itself penetrated by this as by its essence: that existence is its life, believing consciousness asserts itself to be in direct unity with it. Thought thinks the absolute existence; such existence is to it absolute thought, absolute understanding, pure thought; but that signifies that it is likewise immediate itself. On the other hand to faith the immediacy of absolute existence has also the significance of a Being: it is, and is another than ‘I.’ And the same is true of the thinker; to him it is absolute Being, actual in itself, and different from self-consciousness or thought as finite understanding, to use the common term. Now what is the reason that faith and thought do not understand one another, and each recognize itself in the other? In the first place faith has no consciousness of being a thought, inasmuch as it asserts absolute consciousness to be identical with it as self-consciousness, and has direct inward knowledge of the same. But it expresses this simple unity; in its consciousness it is only immediacy so to speak in the signification of Being, a unity of its unconscious substance. In the second place Being-for-self is contained in thought; to this faith opposes the immediacy of Being. Thought, on the contrary, has the immediate as absolute potentiality, as absolutely a thing of thought: and the immediacy belonging to this thing of thought is without the determination of Being, of life. On the heights of this abstraction the two stand opposed to each other, as the Aufklärung which asserts absolute existence to be a Beyond of self-consciousness, and as the materialism which makes it so to speak present matter (supra, pp. 382, 383). In the one case it is in faith and thought as positive existence or thought, and in the other it is the negative of self-consciousness, which is thus either only determined as negative, as a Beyond, or likewise as existent for self-consciousness. Hence faith and thought are both of them knowledge. We call universal knowledge thought, particular knowledge we call sensuous perception; and we term the introduction of external determinations understanding. The universal element in man is thought, but to it likewise appertains religious feeling for instance; the animal does not possess it, for it has no human feeling; and in so far as this feeling is religious, it is the feeling of a thinker, and what determines this feeling is not the determination of natural desire, &c., but a universal determination. Thus God, even though He is only felt and believed in, is yet the universal taken quite abstractly—even in His personality He is the absolutely universal personality.

As thought and faith are thus one, the same is true of the antithesis between mediated and immediate knowledge. We must, it is true, keep before our eyes the fact that what is revealed in immediate knowledge is the universal. But abstract immediate knowledge is natural, sensuous knowledge; the immediate man in his natural condition, in his desires, does not know this universal. Children, the Esquimaux, &c., know nothing of God; or what the natural man knows of Him is not a real knowledge of Him. Thus the intuitive knowledge of the Egyptians told them that God was an ox or a cat, and the Indians still possess similar sorts of knowledge. On the other hand when man has come so far as to know God as merely an object of the mind, i.e. as spiritual, it is easy to perceive that this knowledge which is asserted to be immediate is really a result mediated through instruction, through a long continued culture. It is only by means of being elevated above nature that man arrives at a consciousness of what is higher, and at a knowledge of the universal; there indeed his knowledge is immediate, but he has only arrived at this through mediation. I think, and thus I know the universal immediately, but this very thought is just process in itself, movement and life. All life is process within itself, is mediated, and this is all the more true of spiritual life; for it is the passing from one to the other, that is, from the merely natural and sensuous to the spiritual. It thus indicates a deficiency in the most simple reflection not to know that the universal is not in immediate knowledge, but is a result of the culture, the education, and the self-revelation of the human race. If immediate knowledge is to be allowed, everyone will be responsible merely to himself: this man knows this, another that, and consequently everything is justified and approved, however contrary to right and religion. This opposition between immediacy and mediacy is thus a very barren and quite empty determination; it is a platitude of the extremest type to consider anything like this to be a true opposition; it proceeds from a most wooden understanding, which thinks that an immediacy can be something on its own account, without a mediation within itself. If Philosophy were to result in this it would be a poor affair; these determinations are merely forms, none of which has intrinsic truth. The form into which Philosophy has in Jacobi’s case finally fallen, which is that immediacy is grasped as absolute, manifests a lack of all critical faculty, of all logic. The Kantian philosophy is critical philosophy, but from it the fact has been omitted that we cannot constitute the infinite with finite categories—and immediacy is such an one. When we regard this opposition more closely all knowledge may be termed immediate, but all immediate knowledge is likewise mediated in itself. This we know within our consciousness, and we may see it in the most general phenomena. I know, for example, of America immediately, and yet this knowledge is very much mediated. If I stand in America and see its soil, I must first of all have journeyed to it, Columbus must first have discovered it, ships must have been built, &c.; all these discoveries and inventions pertain to it. That which we now know immediately is consequently a result of infinitely many mediations. Likewise when I see a right-angled triangle I know that the squares of the two sides are equal to the square of the hypotenuse: I know this immediately, and yet I have merely learned it and am convinced of it through the mediation of proof. Immediate knowledge is thus everywhere mediated, and Philosophy does nothing but bring this to consciousness—demonstrating the mediation which in point of fact is already present there, e.g. in religion, &c.

The philosophy of Jacobi, inasmuch as it says: “Thought cannot proceed further than to the feeling of God,” has been accepted utiliter; it was more easily arrived at than in the case of Kant. Knowledge, however, is something very different from what Jacobi calls such; against finite knowledge his arguments are quite correct. Immediate knowledge is not knowledge, comprehension, for that implies that the content is determined in itself, i.e. is grasped as concrete. But in immediate knowledge it is the case that the only fact known of God is that He exists. For should there be determinations respecting God, they must, according to Jacobi, be grasped as a finite, and the knowledge of them would again merely be a progression from finite to finite. There thus remains only the indeterminate conception of God, an “Above me,” an indeterminate Beyond. This gives accordingly the same result as does the Aufklärung, viz. that the highest reality is ultimate: we find the same in French philosophy and in Kant—only here we still have the opinion that this emptiness is the highest philosophy possible. But if each standpoint has an aspect wherein it is justified, there always rests in the proposition that the human mind knows God immediately, the important consideration that we have here a recognition of the freedom of the human spirit: in it we have the source of the knowledge of God, and all externality of authority is thus abrogated in this principle. The principle is hereby gained, but only the principle of freedom of spirit; and the greatness of our time rests in the fact that freedom, the peculiar possession of mind whereby it is at home with itself in itself, is recognized, and that mind has this consciousness within itself. This however is merely abstract, for the next step is that the principle of freedom is again purified and comes to its true objectivity, so that not everything which strikes me or springs up within me must, because it is manifested in me, hold good as true. It is only through thought, which casts off the particular and accidental, that the principle receives this objectivity which is independent of mere subjectivity and in and for itself—though in such a way that the freedom of mind still remains respected. One’s own spirit must bear witness to spirit that God is Spirit; the content must be true. But this does not give authenticity to itself by its being revealed with certainty to me. This is the standpoint, and we have thus seen its deficiency and the greatness of the principle which is involved in it.

B. KANT.

The philosophy of Kant, which we have now more particularly to consider, made its appearance at the same time as the above. While Descartes asserted certainty to be the unity of thought and Being, we now have the consciousness of thought in its subjectivity, i.e. in the first place, as determinateness in contrast with objectivity, and then as finitude and progression in finite determinations. Abstract thought as personal conviction is that which is maintained as certain; its contents are experience, but the methods adopted by experience are once more formal thought and argument. Kant turns back to the standpoint of Socrates; we see in him the freedom of the subject as we saw it with the Stoics, but the task in respect of content is now placed on a higher level. An endless aiming at the concrete is required for thought, a filling up in accordance with the rule which completion prescribes, which signifies that the content is itself the Idea as the unity of the Notion and reality. With Jacobi thought, demonstration, does not in the first place reach beyond the finite and conditioned, and in the second place, even when God is likewise the metaphysical object, the demonstration is really the making Him conditioned and finite; in the third place the unconditioned, what is then immediately certain, only exists in faith, a subjectively fixed point of view but an unknowable one, that is to say an undetermined, indeterminable, and consequently an unfruitful one. The standpoint of the philosophy of Kant, on the contrary, is in the first place to be found in the fact that thought has through its reasoning got so far as to grasp itself not as contingent but rather as in itself the absolute ultimate. In the finite, in connection with the finite, an absolute standpoint is raised which acts as a connecting bond; it binds together the finite and leads up to the infinite. Thought grasped itself as all in all, as absolute in judgment; for it nothing external is authoritative, since all authority can receive validity only through thought. This thought, determining itself within itself and concrete, is, however, in the second place, grasped as subjective, and this aspect of subjectivity is the form which from Jacobi’s point of view is predominant; the fact that thought is concrete Jacobi has on the other hand for the most part set aside. Both standpoints remain philosophies of subjectivity; since thought is subjective, the capacity of knowing the absolute is denied to it. To Kant God cannot on the one hand be found in experience; He can neither be found in outward experience—as Lalande discovered when he swept the whole heavens and found no God—nor can He be discovered within; though no doubt mystics and enthusiasts can experience many things in themselves, and amongst these God, i.e. the Infinite. On the other hand Kant argues to prove the existence of God, who is to him an hypothesis necessary for the explanation of things, a postulate of practical reason. But in this connection another French astronomer made the following reply to the Emperor Napoleon: “Je n’ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.” According to this the truth underlying the Kantian philosophy is the recognition of freedom. Even Rousseau represented the absolute to be found in freedom; Kant has the same principle, but taken rather from the theoretic side. The French regard it from the side of will, which is represented in their proverb: “Il a la tête près du bonnet.” France possesses the sense of actuality, of promptitude; because in that country conception passes more immediately into action, men have there applied themselves more practically to the affairs of actuality. But however much freedom may be in itself concrete, it was as undeveloped and in its abstraction that it was there applied to actuality; and to make abstractions hold good in actuality means to destroy actuality. The fanaticism which characterized the freedom which was put into the hands of the people was frightful. In Germany the same principle asserted the rights of consciousness on its own account, but it has been worked out in a merely theoretic way. We have commotions of every kind within us and around us, but through them all the German head quietly keeps its nightcap on and silently carries on its operations beneath it.

Immanuel Kant was born at Königsberg in 1724, and there studied theology to begin with; in the year 1755 he entered upon his work as an academic teacher; in 1770 he became professor of logic, and in 1804 he died at Königsberg on the 12th of February, having almost attained his eightieth year (Tennemann’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie by Wendt, § 380, pp. 465, 466), without ever having left his native town.

While to Wolff thought as thought was merely positive self-identity and grasped itself as such, we saw the negative self-moving thought, the absolute Notion, appear in all its power in France; and in the Aufklärung it likewise made its way to Germany in such a manner that all existence, all action, was called upon to serve a useful purpose, i.e. the implicit was done away with and everything had to be for another; and that for which everything had to be is man, self-consciousness, taken, however, as signifying all men generally. The consciousness of this action in abstract form is the Kantian philosophy. It is thus the self-thinking absolute Notion that passes into itself which we see making its appearance in Germany through this philosophy, in such a way that all reality falls within self-consciousness; it is the idealism which vindicates all moments of the implicit to self-consciousness, but which at first itself remains subject to a contradiction, inasmuch as it still separates this implicit from itself. In other words the Kantian philosophy no doubt leads reality back to self-consciousness, but it can supply no reality to this essence of self-consciousness, or to this pure self-consciousness, nor can it demonstrate Being in the same. It apprehends simple thought as having difference in itself, but does not yet apprehend that all reality rests on this difference; it does not know how to obtain mastery over the individuality of self-consciousness, and although it describes reason very well, it does this in an unthinking empiric way which again robs it of the truth it has. Theoretically the Kantian philosophy is the “Illumination” or Aufklärung reduced to method; it states that nothing true can be known, but only the phenomenal; it leads knowledge into consciousness and self-consciousness, but from this standpoint maintains it to be a subjective and finite knowledge. Thus although it deals with the infinite Idea, expressing its formal categories and arriving at its concrete claims, it yet again denies this to be the truth, making it a simple subjective, because it has once for all accepted finite knowledge as the fixed and ultimate standpoint. This philosophy made an end of the metaphysic of the understanding as an objective dogmatism, but in fact it merely transformed it into a subjective dogmatism, i.e. into a consciousness in which these same finite determinations of the understanding persist, and the question of what is true in and for itself has been abandoned. Its study is made difficult by its diffuseness and prolixity, and by the peculiar terminology found in it. Nevertheless this diffuseness has one advantage, that inasmuch as the same thing is often repeated, the main points are kept before us, and these cannot easily be lost from view.

We shall endeavour to trace the lines which Kant pursued. The philosophy of Kant has in the first place a direct relation to that of Hume as stated above (p. 370). That is to say, the significance of the Kantian philosophy, generally expressed, is from the very beginning to allow that determinations such as those of universality and necessity are not to be met with in perception, and this Hume has already shown in relation to Locke. But while Hume attacks the universality and necessity of the categories generally, and Jacobi their finitude, Kant merely argues against their objectivity in so far as they are present in external things themselves, while maintaining them to be objective in the sense of holding good as universal and necessary, as they do, for instance, in mathematics and natural science. The fact that we crave for universality and necessity as that which first constitutes the objective, Kant thus undoubtedly allows. But if universality and necessity do not exist in external things, the question arises “Where are they to be found?” To this Kant, as against Hume, maintains that they must be a priori, i.e. that they must rest on reason itself, and on thought as self-conscious reason; their source is the subject, “I” in my self-consciousness. This, simply expressed, is the main point in the Kantian philosophy.

In the second place the philosophy of Kant is likewise called a critical philosophy because its aim, says Kant, is first of all to supply a criticism of our faculties of knowledge; for before obtaining knowledge we must inquire into the faculties of knowledge. To the healthy human understanding that is plausible, and to it this has been a great discovery. Knowledge is thereby represented as an instrument, as a method and means whereby we endeavour to possess ourselves of the truth. Thus before men can make their way to the truth itself they must know the nature and function of their instrument. They must see whether it is capable of supplying what is demanded of it—of seizing upon the object; they must know what the alterations it makes in the object are, in order that these alterations may not be mixed up with the determinations of the object itself. This would appear as though men could set forth upon the search for truth with spears and staves. And a further claim is made when it is said that we must know the faculty of knowledge before we can know. For to investigate the faculties of knowledge means to know them; but how we are to know without knowing, how we are to apprehend the truth before the truth, it is impossible to say. It is the old story of the σχολαστικός who would not go into the water till he could swim. Thus since the investigation of the faculties of knowledge is itself knowing, it cannot in Kant attain to what it aims at because it is that already—it cannot come to itself because it is already with itself; the same thing happens as happened with the Jews, the Spirit passes through the midst of them and they know it not. At the same time the step taken by Kant is a great and important one—that is, the fact that he has made knowledge the subject of his consideration.

On the one hand this critique of knowledge applies to the empirical knowledge of Locke, which asserts itself to be grounded on experience, and, on the other hand, it also deals with what claims to be on the whole a more metaphysical kind of philosophy—the Wolffian and German—which had also taken up the line of proceeding on the more empiric method which has been depicted. But this last has at the same time kept itself separate from the merely empiric method, inasmuch as its main efforts have been directed towards making such categories of thought as those of potentiality, actuality, God, &c., have as their foundation categories of the understanding, and then reasoning from them. The Kantian philosophy is in the first instance directed against both. Kant takes away the objective significance of the determinations of the Wolffian metaphysics, and shows how they must be ascribed to subjective thought alone. At the same time Jacobi likewise declared himself against this metaphysic, but since he started more especially from the standpoint of the French and Germans, his point of view was different: he asserts that our finite thought can set forth finite determinations alone, and thus can only consider God and Spirit in accordance with finite relationships. On the practical side there reigned at that time the so-called happiness theory, since man’s inherent Notion and the way to realize this Notion was apprehended in morality as a satisfaction of his desires. As against this Kant has very rightly shown that it involves a heteronomy and not an autonomy of reason—a determination through nature and consequently an absence of freedom. But because the rational principle of Kant was formal, and his successors could not make any further progress with reason, and yet morality had to receive a content, Fries and others must still be called Hedonists though they avoid giving themselves the name.

In the third place, as regards the relation of the categories to the material which is given through experience, there is according to Kant already inherent in the subjective determinations of thought, e.g. in those of cause and effect, the capacity of themselves to bind together the differences which are present in that material. Kant considers thought as in great measure a synthetic activity, and hence he represents the main question of Philosophy to be this, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Judgment signifies the combination of thought-determinations as subject and predicate. Synthetic judgments a priori are nothing else than a connection of opposites through themselves, or the absolute Notion, i.e. the relations of different determinations such as those of cause and effect, given not through experience but through thought. Space and time likewise form the connecting element; they are thus a priori, i.e. in self-consciousness. Since Kant shows that thought has synthetic judgments a priori which are not derived from perception, he shows that thought is so to speak concrete in itself. The idea which is present here is a great one, but, on the other hand, quite an ordinary signification is given it, for it is worked out from points of view which are inherently rude and empirical, and a scientific form is the last thing that can be claimed for it. In the presentation of it there is a lack of philosophical abstraction, and it is expressed in the most commonplace way; to say nothing more of the barbarous terminology, Kant remains restricted and confined by his psychological point of view and empirical methods.

To mention one example only of his barbarous expressions, Kant calls his philosophy (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 19) a Transcendental philosophy, i.e. a system of principles of pure reason which demonstrate the universal and necessary elements in the self-conscious understanding, without occupying themselves with objects or inquiring what universality and necessity are; this last would be transcendent. Transcendent and transcendental have accordingly to be clearly distinguished. Transcendent mathematics signifies the mathematics in which the determination of infinitude is made use of in a pre-eminent degree: in this sphere of mathematics we say, for instance, that the circle consists of an infinitude of straight lines; the periphery is represented as straight, and since the curve is represented as straight this passes beyond the geometric category and is consequently transcendent. Kant, on the contrary, defines the transcendental philosophy as not a philosophy which by means of categories passes beyond its own sphere, but one which points out in subjective thought, in consciousness, the sources of what may become transcendent. Thought would thus be transcendent if the categories of universality, of cause and effect, were predicated of the object, for in this way men would from the subjective element ‘transcend’ into another sphere. We are not justified in so doing as regards the result nor even to begin with, since we merely contemplate thought within thought itself. Thus we do not desire to consider the categories in their objective sense, but in so far as thought is the source of such synthetic relationships; the necessary and universal thus here receive the significance of resting in our faculties of knowledge. But from this faculty of knowledge Kant still separates the implicit, the thing-in-itself, so that the universality and necessity are all the time a subjective conditionment of knowledge merely, and reason with its universality and necessity does not attain to a knowledge of the truth. For it requires perception and experience, a material empirically given in order, as subjectivity, to attain to knowledge. As Kant says, these form its “constituent parts”; one part it has in itself, but the other is empirically given. When reason desires to be independent, to exist in itself and to derive truth from itself, it becomes transcendent; it transcends experience because it lacks the other constituent, and then creates mere hallucinations of the brain. It is hence not constitutive in knowledge but only regulative; it is the unity and rule for the sensuous manifold. But this unity on its own account is the unconditioned, which, transcending experience, merely arrives at contradictions. In the practical sphere alone is reason constitutive. The critique of reason is consequently not the knowing of objects, but of knowledge and its principles, its range and limitations, so that it does not become transcendent. This is an extremely general account of what we shall now consider in its separate details.

In dealing with this matter Kant adopts the plan of first considering theoretic reason, the knowledge which relates to outward objects. In the second place he investigates the will as self-actualization; and, in the third place, the faculty of judgment, the special consideration of the unity of the universal and individual; how far he gets in this matter we shall likewise see. But the critique of the faculty of knowledge is the matter of main importance.

1. In the first place, as to the theoretic philosophy, Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason sets to work in a psychological manner, i.e. historically, inasmuch as he describes the main stages in theoretic consciousness. The first faculty is sensuousness generally, the second understanding, the third reason. All this he simply narrates; he accepts it quite empirically, without developing it from the Notion or proceeding by necessity.

a. The a priori fact of sensuous existence, the forms of sensuous existence, constitute the beginning of this transcendentalism. Kant calls the judgment of the same the transcendental æsthetic. Nowadays æsthetic signifies the knowledge of the beautiful. But here the doctrine of intuition or perception is taken from the point of view of its universality, i.e. from what in it pertains to the subject as such. Perception, says Kant, is the knowledge of an object given to us through the senses; sensuousness, however, is the capacity of being affected by conceptions as external. Now, according to Kant, in perception there are to be found all manner of contents, and in dealing with this he first of all distinguishes feeling as external, such as redness, colour, hardness, &c., and then as internal, such as justice, wrath, love, fear, pleasurable and religious feelings, &c. He says content such as this forms the one constituent and pertains to feeling; all this is subjective and merely subjective. In this sensuous element there is, however, a universal sensuous element likewise contained, which as such does not belong to feeling in so far as it is immediately determined; in such a content this ‘other’ consists in the categories of space and time, which of themselves are void and empty. The filling in is performed by the content, by colour, softness, hardness, &c., as regards space; while as regards time, the same content, so soon as it is something transient, or again some other content, and in particular inward feelings are what causes the determination. Space and time are consequently pure, i.e. abstract perceptions in which we place outside of us the content of individual sensations, either in time as succeeding one another, or in space as separate from one another. Here we thus meet with the division between subjectivity and objectivity, for if we isolate the ‘alongside of’ and ‘after’ we have space and time. It is the act of a priori sensuousness to project the content; the forms of intuition or perception constitute this pure perception. Now everything indeed is termed perception, even thought and consciousness; God, who certainly pertains to thought alone, is said to be comprehended by perception or intuition, the so-called immediate consciousness.

Kant further remarks in this regard, (1) “Space is no empirical Notion which has been derived from outward experiences.” But the Notion is never really anything empiric: it is in barbarous forms like this that Kant, however, always expresses himself: “For in order that I may relate my sensations to something outside of me, I must presuppose space.” Of time Kant speaks in similar terms: “In order that something outside of me may be represented in separate space or time, the conception of space and time must come first, or it cannot be derived from experience, for experience first becomes possible through this antecedent conception.” That is to say, time and space which may appear as objective, since their particular filling in certainly belongs to subjective feeling, are not empirical; for consciousness has time and space first of all in itself. (2) “Space is a necessary conception which lies at the basis of all external perceptions. Space and time are conceptions a priori, because we cannot represent things without space and time. Time is a necessary basis for all phenomena.” As a priori, space and time are universal and necessary, that is to say we find this to be the case; but it does not follow that they must be previously present as conceptions. They are fundamental indeed, but they are likewise an external universal. Kant however places the matter somewhat in this fashion: there are things-in-themselves outside, but devoid of time and space; consciousness now comes, and it has time and space beforehand present in it as the possibility of experience, just as in order to eat it has mouth and teeth, &c., as conditions necessary for eating. The things which are eaten have not the mouth and teeth, and as eating is brought to bear on things, so space and time are also brought to bear on them; just as things are placed in the mouth and between the teeth, so is it with space and time. (3) “Space and time are not general Notions of the relations of things, but pure intuitive perceptions. For we can only represent to ourselves one space; there are not different component parts of space.” The same is the case with time. The abstract conception tree, for example, is in its actuality a number of individual and separate trees, but spaces are not such particulars, nor are they parts; for one immediate continuity remains, and hence a simple unity. Ordinary perception has always something individual before it; space or time are always however one only, and therefore a priori. It might however be replied to Kant: The nature of space and time undoubtedly involves their being an abstract universal; but there is in like manner only one blue. (4) “Each Notion or conception certainly comprises an infinite number of conceptions under itself, but not within itself; nevertheless this last is the case in space and time, and they are therefore intuitive perceptions and not Notions or conceptions.” Space and time, then, are certainly not thought-determinations, if no thoughts are there present, but a Notion, so soon as we have a Notion of them.

From the transcendental point of view it is likewise maintained that this conception of space and time contains synthetic propositions a priori, connected with the consciousness of its necessity. Examples of these synthetic propositions are sought in statements such as that of space having three dimensions, or in the definition of a straight line, that it is the shortest distance between two points, and likewise in the statement that 5 + 7 = 12. All these propositions are however very analytic. Kant nevertheless in the first place holds that such propositions do not take their rise from experience, or, as we might better express it, are not an individual contingent perception; this is very true, the perception is universal and necessary. In the second place he states that we acquire them from pure sensuous perception, and not through the understanding or Notion. But Kant does not grasp the two together, and yet this comprehension of them is involved in such propositions being immediately certain even in ordinary perception. When Kant then expresses himself (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 49) to the effect that we have many sensations which constitute “the real matter,” with which we externally and inwardly “occupy our minds,” and that the mind has in itself in space and time “formal conditions of the mode in which we place them” (those manifold feelings) “in our mind,” the question of how mind arrives at having just these special forms now forces itself upon us. But what the nature of time and space is, it does not occur to the Kantian philosophy to inquire. To it what space and time are in themselves does not signify ‘What is their Notion,’ but ‘Are they external things or something in the mind?’

b. The second faculty, the understanding, is something very different from sensuousness; the latter is Receptivity, while Kant calls thought in general Spontaneity—an expression which belongs to the philosophy of Leibnitz. The understanding is active thought, I myself; it “is the faculty of thinking the object of sensuous perception.” Yet it has thoughts merely without real content: “Thoughts without content are void and empty, sensuous perceptions without Notions are blind.” The understanding thus obtains from the sensuous its matter, both empirical and a priori, time and space; and it thinks this matter, but its thoughts are very different from this matter. Or it is a faculty of a particular kind, and it is only when both occur, when the sensuous faculty has supplied material and the understanding has united to this its thoughts, that knowledge results. The thoughts of the understanding as such are thus limited thoughts, thoughts of the finite only.

Now logic, as transcendental logic, likewise sets forth the conceptions which the understanding has a priori in itself and “whereby it thinks objects completely a priori.” Thoughts have a form which signifies their being the synthetic function which brings the manifold into a unity. I am this unity, the transcendental apperception, the pure apperception of self-consciousness. I = I; I must ‘accompany’ all our conceptions. This is a barbarous exposition of the matter. As self-consciousness I am the completely void, general I, completely indeterminate and abstract; apperception is determination generally, the activity whereby I transplant an empirical content into my simple consciousness, while perception rather signifies feeling or conceiving. In order that a content may enter this One, it must be infected by its simplicity; it is thus that the content first becomes my content. The comprehending medium is ‘I’; whatever I have to do with must allow itself to be forced into these forms of unity. This is a great fact, an important item of knowledge; what thought produces is unity; thus it produces itself, for it is the One. Yet the fact that I am the one and, as thinking, the simplifier, is not by Kant satisfactorily set forth. The unity may likewise be called relation; for in so far as a manifold is presupposed, and as this on the one side remains a manifold while on the other side it is set forth as one, so far may it be said to be related.

Now as ‘I’ is the universal transcendental unity of self-consciousness which binds together the empirical matter of conception generally, there are various modes in this relationship, and here we have the transcendental nature of the categories or universal thought-determinations. But Kant (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 70, 77) approaches these modes of simplicity by accepting them as they are classified in ordinary logic. For he says that in common logic particular kinds of judgment are brought forward; and since judgment is a special kind of relationship of the manifold, the various functions of thought which ‘I’ has in it are shown therein. But the following kinds of judgment have been noticed, viz. Universal, Particular and Singular; Affirmative, Negative, Infinite; Categorical, Hypothetical, Disjunctive; Assertoric, Problematic and Apodictic judgments. These particular modes of relationship now brought forward are the pure forms of the understanding. There are thus, according to Kant (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 75, 76, 78-82), twelve fundamental categories, which fall into four classes; and it is noteworthy, and deserves to be recognized, that each species of judgment again constitutes a triad. (1) The first kind of categories are those of Quantity, viz. Unity, Plurality and Totality. Plurality is negation of the one, the assertion of difference; and the third, the bringing of the other two into one, plurality circumscribed, the indeterminate plurality comprehended as one, is the Totality. (2) In the second series are the categories of Quality: Reality, Negation, Limitation. Limitation is as real or positive as negation. (3) The third series comprises the categories of relation, of connection; and first of all, indeed, the relation of Substantiality, Substance and Accident: then the relation of Causality, the relation of Cause and Effect, and finally Reciprocity. (4) The categories of Modality, of the relation of the objective to our thought, come fourth, viz. Possibility, Existence (actuality) and Necessity. Possibility should come second; in abstract thought, however, the empty conception comes first. It betrays a great instinct for the Notion when Kant says that the first category is positive, the second the negative of the first, the third the synthesis of the two. The triplicity, this ancient form of the Pythagoreans, Neo-Platonists and of the Christian religion, although it here reappears as a quite external schema only, conceals within itself the absolute form, the Notion. But since Kant says that a conception can determine itself in me as accidental, as cause, effect, unity, plurality, &c., we thereby have the whole of the metaphysics of the understanding. Kant does not follow up further the derivation of these categories, and he finds them imperfect, but he says that the others are derived from them. Kant thus accepts the categories in an empiric way, without thinking of developing of necessity these differences from unity. Just as little did Kant attempt to deduce time and space, for he accepted them likewise from experience—a quite unphilosophic and unjustifiable procedure.

Thinking understanding is thus indeed the source of the individual categories, but because on their own account they are void and empty, they only have significance through their union with the given, manifold material of perception, feeling, &c. Such connection of sensuous material with categories now constitutes the facts of experience, i.e. the matter of sensation after it is brought under the categories; and this is knowledge generally. The matter of perception which pertains to the feelings or sensuous perception is not left in the determination of individuality and immediacy, but I am active in relation to it, inasmuch as I bring it into connection through the categories and elevate it into universal species, natural laws, &c. The question of whether a completed sensuousness or the Notion is the higher may accordingly be easily decided. For the laws of the heavens are not immediately perceived, but merely the change in position on the part of the stars. It is only when this object of immediate perception is laid hold of and brought under universal thought-determinations that experience arises therefrom, which has a claim to validity for all time. The category which brings the unity of thought into the content of feeling is thus the objective element in experience, which receives thereby universality and necessity, while that which is perceived is rather the subjective and contingent. Our finding both these elements in experience demonstrates indeed that a correct analysis has been made. Kant (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 119, 120) however connects with this the statement that experience grasps phenomena only, and that by means of the knowledge which we obtain through, experience we do not know things as they are in themselves, but only as they are in the form of laws of perception and sensuousness. For the first component part of experience, sensation, is doubtless subjective, since it is connected with our organs. The matter of perception is only what it is in my sensation. I know of this sensation only and not of the thing. But, in the second place, the objective, which ought to constitute the opposite to this subjective side, is itself subjective likewise: it does not indeed pertain to my feeling, but it remains shut up in the region of my self-consciousness; the categories are only determinations of our thinking understanding. Neither the one nor the other is consequently anything in itself, nor are both together, knowledge, anything in itself, for it only knows phenomena—a strange contradiction.

The transition of the category to the empiric is made in the following way: “Pure conceptions of the understanding are quite of a different nature from empiric, indeed from any sensuous perceptions;” we have thus “to show how pure conceptions of the understanding can be applied to phenomena.” This is dealt with by the transcendental faculty of judgment. For Kant says that in the mind, in self-consciousness, there are pure conceptions of the understanding and pure sensuous perceptions; now it is the schematism of the pure understanding, the transcendental faculty of the imagination, which determines the pure sensuous perception in conformity with the category and thus constitutes the transition to experience. The connection of these two is again one of the most attractive sides of the Kantian philosophy, whereby pure sensuousness and pure understanding, which were formerly expressed as absolute opposites, are now united. There is thus here present a perceptive understanding or an understanding perception; but Kant does not see this, he does not bring these thoughts together: he does not grasp the fact that he has here brought both sides of knowledge into one, and has thereby expressed their implicitude. Knowledge itself is in fact the unity and truth of both moments; but with Kant the thinking understanding and sensuousness are both something particular, and they are only united in an external, superficial way, just as a piece of wood and a leg might be bound together by a cord. Thus, for example, the conception of substance in the schema becomes permanent in time, i.e. the pure conception of the understanding, the pure category, is brought into unity with the form of pure sensuous perception.

In as far as we have to deal with our own determinations only and as we do not reach the implicit, the true objective, the Kantian philosophy called itself Idealism. But in this connection Kant (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 200, 201) brings forward a refutation of empirical or material idealism, thus: “I am conscious of my existence as determined in time. But all time-determination presupposes something permanent in perception. This permanence cannot be” a sensuous perception “in me.” For all the determining grounds of my existence which are met with in me are conceptions, and as such themselves require a constant element different from them, and in relation to which the change taking place in them—consequently “my existence in time,” in which they change, “may be determined.” Or I am conscious of my existence as of an empirical consciousness which is only capable of being determined in relation to something which is outside of me; i.e. I am conscious of something external to me. Conversely it may be said: I am conscious of external things as determined in time and as changing; these hence presuppose something constant which is not in them but outside of them. And this is ‘I,’ the transcendental ground of their universality and necessity, of their implicitude, the unity of self-consciousness. On another occasion Kant regards it thus (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 101): These moments confuse themselves, because the constant element is itself a category. Idealism, when we regard it as signifying that nothing exists outside of my individual self-consciousness as individual, as also the refutation of this, the assertion that things exist outside of my self-consciousness as individual, are the one as bad as the other. The former is the idealism of Berkeley, in which self-consciousness as individual is alone in question, or the world of self-consciousness appears as a number of limited, sensuous, individual conceptions, which are as completely devoid of truth as though they were called things. The truth or untruth does not rest in their being things or conceptions, but in their limitation and contingency, whether as conceptions or things. The refutation of this idealism is nothing more than calling attention to the fact that this empirical consciousness does not exist in itself—just as those empiric things do not exist in themselves. But the knowing subject does not with Kant really arrive at reason, for it remains still the individual self-consciousness as such, which is opposed to the universal. As a matter of fact there is described in what we have seen only the empirical finite self-consciousness which requires a material from outside, or which is limited. We do not ask whether these facts of knowledge are in and for themselves true or untrue; the whole of knowledge remains within subjectivity, and on the other side there is the thing-in-itself as an external. This subjectivity is however concrete in itself; even the determinate categories of the thinking understanding are concrete, and much more is experience so—the synthesis of the sensation and the category.

c. The third faculty Kant finds in reason, to which he advances from the understanding after the same psychological method; that is to say, he hunts through the soul’s sack to see what faculties are still to be found there; and thus by merest chance he lights on Reason. It would make no difference if there had been no Reason there, just as with physicists it is a matter of perfect indifference whether, for instance, there is such a thing as magnetism or not. “All our knowledge begins from the senses, thence proceeds to the understanding, and finishes up with reason; nothing higher than this is to be found in us, for it signifies the working up of the material of perception, and the reducing of it to the highest unity of thought.” Reason is therefore, according to Kant, the power of obtaining knowledge from principles, that is, the power of knowing the particular in the universal by means of Notions; the understanding, on the contrary, reaches its particular by means of perception. But the categories are themselves particular. The principle of reason, according to Kant, is really the universal, inasmuch as it finds the unconditioned involved in the conditioned knowledge of the understanding. Understanding is hence for him thought in finite relations; reason, on the contrary, is thought which makes the unconditioned its object. Since Kant’s time it has become customary in the language of philosophy to distinguish understanding and reason, while by earlier philosophers this distinction was not drawn. The product of reason is, according to Kant, the Idea—a Platonic expression—and he understands by it the unconditioned, the infinite. It is a great step forward to say that reason brings forth Ideas; with Kant, however, the Idea is merely the abstract universal, the indeterminate.

This, the unconditioned, must now be grasped as concrete, and therein lies the main difficulty. For to know the unconditioned means to determine it and to deduce its determinations. Much has been written and said on the subject of knowledge, without a definition of it ever having been offered. But it is the business of Philosophy to see that what is taken for granted as known is really known. Now on this point Kant says that reason has certainly the desire to know the infinite, but has not the power. And the reason which Kant gives for this (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 277, 278), is on the one hand that no psychologically sensuous intuition or perception corresponds with the infinite, that it is not given in outward or inward experience; to the Idea “no congruent or corresponding object can be discovered in the sensuous world.” It depends, however, on how the world is looked at; but experience and observation of the world mean nothing else for Kant than a candlestick standing here, and a snuff-box standing there. It is certainly correct to say that the infinite is not given in the world of sensuous perception; and supposing that what we know is experience, a synthesis of what is thought and what is felt, the infinite can certainly not be known in the sense that we have a sensuous perception of it. But no one wishes to demand a sensuous proof in verification of the infinite; spirit is for spirit alone. The second reason for considering that the infinite cannot be known, lies in this, that Reason has no part in it except as supplying the forms of thought which we call categories; and these doubtless afford what Kant calls objective determinations, but in such a way that in themselves they are still only subjective. If therefore for the determination of the infinite we employ these categories which are applicable only to phenomena, we entangle ourselves in false arguments (paralogisms) and in contradictions (antinomies); and it is an important point in the Kantian philosophy that the infinite, so far as it is defined by means of categories, loses itself in contradictions. Although reason, says Kant, becomes transcendent by the exhibition of these contradictions, it still retains its claim to trace perception, experience, and knowledge pertaining to the understanding, back to the infinite. This union of the infinite, the unconditioned, with the finite and conditioned as existing in the knowledge given by the understanding, or even in perception, would signify that the acme of concreteness had been reached.

Of this Unconditioned there are several kinds, objects having special features of their own and proceeding from reason, transcendental Ideas; they are thus themselves particular in their nature. The manner in which Kant arrives at these Ideas is again derived from experience, from formal logic, according to which there are various forms of the syllogism. Because, says Kant, there are three forms of the syllogism, categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive, the Unconditioned is also three-fold in its nature: “Firstly, an Unconditioned of the categorical synthesis in a subject.” Synthesis is the concrete; but the expression is ambiguous, since it indicates an external association of independent elements. “In the second place, an Unconditioned of the hypothetical synthesis of the members of a series will have to be looked for; and in the third place, an Unconditioned of the disjunctive synthesis of the parts in a system.” We make the first connection, expressed as object of Reason or transcendental Idea, when we conceive “the thinking subject;” the second “is the sum total of all phenomena, the world;” and the third is “the thing which contains the supreme condition of the possibility of all that can be thought, the Being of all Beings,” i.e. God. When brought to an ultimate point, the question which meets us is whether Reason can bring these objects to reality, or whether they remain confined to subjective thought. Now, according to Kant, Reason is not capable of procuring reality for its Ideas—otherwise it would be transcendent, its limits would be overstepped; it produces only paralogisms, antinomies, and an ideal without reality.

α. “A. paralogism is a syllogism false in its form.” Since Reason credits with reality that mode of the Unconditioned which constitutes the categorical synthesis in a subject, and therefore the thinking subject, it is termed substance. Now is the thinking ego a substance, a soul, a soul-thing? Further questions are whether it is permanent, immaterial, incorruptible, personal and immortal, and such as to have a real community with the body. The falsity of the syllogism consists in this, that the idea of the unity of the transcendental subject essential to Reason is expressed as a thing; for it is only in this way that the permanency of the same becomes substance. Otherwise I find myself permanent in my thought, of course, but only within perceiving consciousness, not outside of that. The ego is therefore the empty, transcendental subject of our thoughts, that moreover becomes known only through its thoughts; but of what it is in itself we cannot gather the least idea. (A horrible distinction! For thought is nothing more or less than the “in-itself” or implicit.) We cannot assert of it any present Being, because thought is an empty form, we have a conception of what thinking Beings are through no outward experience, but only by means of self-consciousness,—i.e. because we cannot take the “I” in our hands, nor see it, nor smell it. We therefore know very well that the ego is a subject, but if we pass beyond self-consciousness, and say that it is substance, we go farther than we are entitled to do. I cannot therefore assign any reality to the subject.

We here see Kant fall into contradiction, what with the barbarity of the conceptions which he refutes, and the barbarity of his own conceptions which remain behind when the others are refuted. In the first place, he is perfectly correct when he maintains that the ego is not a soul-thing, a dead permanency which has a sensuous present existence; indeed, were it to be an ordinary thing, it would be necessary that it should be capable of being experienced. But, in the second place, Kant does not assert the contrary of this, namely that the ego, as this universal or as self-thinking, has in itself the true reality which he requires as an objective mode. For he does not get clear of the conception of reality in which reality consists in the possession of a sensuous present existence; accordingly, because the ego is given in no outward experience, it is not real. For self-consciousness, the ego as such, is not, according to Kant, reality; it is only our thought, or in other words he regards self-consciousness as being itself simply and entirely sensuous. The form which Kant accordingly bestows on Being, thing, substance, would seem to indicate that these categories of the understanding were too high for the subject, too high to be capable of being predicated of it. But really such determinations are too poor and too mean, for what possesses life is not a thing, nor can the soul, the spirit, the ego, be called a thing. Being is the least or lowest quality that one can assign to spirit, its abstract, immediate identity with itself; Being thus no doubt pertains to spirit, but it must be considered as a determination scarcely worth applying to it.

β. In the second place we have the antinomy, i.e. the contradiction in Reason’s Idea of the Unconditioned, an Idea applied to the world in order to represent it as a complete summing-up of conditions. That is to say, in the given phenomena Reason demands the absolute completeness of the conditions of their possibility, so far as these constitute a series, so that the unconditioned is contained in the world, i.e. the totality of the series. If now this completeness is expressed as existing, an antinomy is alone presented, and Reason is presented only as dialectic: i.e. in this object there is on every side a perfect contradiction found. For phenomena are a finite content, and the world is a conjunction of the limited; if this content is now thought by Reason, and therefore subsumed under the unconditioned and the unlimited, we have two determinations, finite and infinite, which contradict each other. Reason demands a perfectly complete synthesis, an absolute beginning; but in phenomena we have, on the contrary, a succession of causes and effects, which never come to an end. Kant here points out four contradictions (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 320), which, however, is not enough; for in each Notion there are antinomies, since it is not simple but concrete, and therefore contains different determinations, which are direct opposites.

αα. These antinomies in the first place involve our making the one determination, limitation, just as valid as non-limitation. “Thesis: The world has a beginning and an end in time, and it is limited in regard to space. Antithesis: It has no beginning and no end in time, and also no limits in space.” The one, says Kant, can be proved just as easily as the other; and indeed he does prove each indirectly, though his are not “advocate’s proofs.” The world, as the universe, is the whole; it is thus a universal idea, and therefore unlimited. The completion of the synthesis in progression as regards time and space is, however, a first beginning of time and space. If therefore the categories of limited and unlimited are applied to the world in order to attain to a knowledge of it, we fall into contradictions, because the categories are not applicable to things-in-themselves.

ββ. The second antinomy is that atoms, from which substance is composed, must necessarily be admitted to exist, therefore simplicity can be proved; but just as easy is it to prove incompleteness, the endless process of division. The thesis is accordingly stated thus: “Every compound substance consists of simple parts,” and the antithesis is as follows: “There exists nothing simple.” The one is here the limit, a material self-existence, the point which is likewise the enclosing surface; the other is divisibility ad infinitum.

γγ. The third antinomy is the opposition between freedom and necessity. The first is the self-determining, the point of view pertaining to infinity: causality according to the laws of freedom is the only causality. The other is: Determinism alone is to be found: everything is determined by means of an external ground or reason.

δδ. The fourth antinomy rests on what follows: On the one hand totality completes itself in freedom as a first beginning of action, or in an absolutely necessary Being, as the cause of the world, so that the process is interrupted: but there is opposed to that freedom the necessity of a process according to conditions of causes and effects, and to the necessity of a Being is opposed the consideration that everything is contingent. The absolute necessity of the conditioned world is therefore on the one hand maintained thus: “To the world belongs an absolutely necessary Being.” The opposite to this is, “There exists no absolutely necessary Being, either as part of the world or outside of the world.”

One of these opposites is just as necessary as the other, and it is superfluous to carry this further here. The necessity of these contradictions is the interesting fact which Kant (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 324) has brought to consciousness; in ordinary metaphysics, however, it is imagined that one of these contradictions must hold good, and the other be disproved. The most important point involved in this assertion of Kant’s is, however, unintentional on his part. For he indeed solves these antinomies (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 385, 386), but only in the particular sense of transcendental idealism, which does not doubt or deny the existence of external things (supra, p. 442), but “allows that things are perceived in space and time” (which is the case, whether it allows it or not): for transcendental idealism, however, “space and time in themselves are not things at all,” and therefore “do not exist apart from our mind;” i.e. all these determinations of a beginning in time, and so on, do not really belong to things, to the implicitude of the phenomenal world, which has independent existence outside of our subjective thought. If such determinations belonged to the world, to God, to free agents, there would be an objective contradiction; but this contradiction is not found as absolute, it pertains only to us. Or, in other words, this transcendental idealism lets the contradiction remain, only it is not Being in itself that is thus contradictory, for the contradiction has its source in our thought alone. Thus the same antinomy remains in our mind; and as it was formerly God who had to take upon Himself all contradictions, so now it is self-consciousness. But the Kantian philosophy does not go on to grapple with the fact that it is not things that are contradictory, but self-consciousness itself. Experience teaches that the ego does not melt away by reason of these contradictions, but continues to exist; we need not therefore trouble ourselves about its contradictions, for it can bear them. Nevertheless Kant shows here too much tenderness for things: it would be a pity, he thinks, if they contradicted themselves. But that mind, which is far higher, should be a contradiction—that is not a pity at all. The contradiction is therefore by no means solved by Kant; and since mind takes it upon itself, and contradiction is self-destructive, mind is in itself all derangement and disorder. The true solution would be found in the statement that the categories have no truth in themselves, and the Unconditioned of Reason just as little, but that it lies in the unity of both as concrete, and in that alone.

γ. Kant now goes on to the Idea of God; this third idea is the Being of Beings, which the other ideas presupposed. Kant says (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 441-452), that according to the definition of Wolff, God is the most real of all Beings; the object then comes to be to prove that God is not only Thought, but that He is, that He has reality, Being. This Kant calls the Ideal of Reason, to distinguish it from the Idea, which is only the sum of all possibility. The Ideal is thus the Idea as existent; just as in art we give the name of ideal to the Idea realized in a sensuous manner. Here Kant takes into consideration the proof of the existence of God, as he asks whether reality can be assigned to this Ideal.

The ontological proof proceeds from the absolute Notion, in order from it to argue up to Being. With Anselm, Descartes, and Spinoza the transition to Being is thus made; and all of them assume in so doing the unity of Being and thought. But Kant says (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 458-466): To this Ideal of Reason just as little reality can be assigned: there is no transition from the Notion to Being. “Being is not a real predicate,” like any other, “a Notion of something which might be added to the Notion of a thing. A hundred real dollars do not contain in the very least more than a hundred possible dollars,” they are the same content, i.e. the same Notion; they are also a hundred exactly. The one is the Notion, or rather the conception, the other is the object; Being is no new determination of the Notion, otherwise my Notion of a hundred real dollars would contain something different from a hundred real dollars. But “the object, as real, is not contained in my Notion alone; or to my Notion the real hundred dollars are synthetically added.” Being cannot therefore be derived from the Notion, because it is not contained therein, but must be added to it. “We must go out of the Notion in order to arrive at existence. With regard to objects of pure thought, there are no means of coming to know of their existence, because it had to be known a priori; but our consciousness of all existence belongs entirely to experience.” That is to say, Kant does not attain to the comprehension of that very synthesis of Notion and Being, or in other words, he does not comprehend existence, i.e. he does not attain to the establishment of it as Notion; existence remains for him something absolutely different from a Notion. The content is no doubt the same for him in what exists and in the Notion: but since Being is not involved in the Notion, the attempt to derive the one from the other is unavailing.

Of course the determination of Being is not found as positive and ready-made in the Notion; the Notion is something different from reality and objectivity. If we therefore abide by the Notion, we abide by Being as something different from the Notion, and adhere to the separation of the two; we then have conception, and not Being at all. That a hundred possible dollars are something different from a hundred actual ones is a reflection of a very popular nature, so much so that no proposition has been so well received as the assertion that no transition can be made from the Notion to Being; for though I imagine to myself a hundred dollars, I do not possess them for all that. But in a like popular fashion it might be said that one must leave off imagining, for that is mere conception: i.e. what is merely imaginary is untrue, the hundred imaginary dollars are and remain imaginary. Therefore to believe in them is a proof of an unsound understanding, and is of no manner of use; and he is a foolish fellow who indulges in such fancies and wishes. One possesses a hundred dollars, when they are real only; if a man has therefore so great a desire to possess a hundred dollars, he must put his hand to work in order to obtain them: i.e. he must not come to a standstill at the imagination of them, but pass out beyond it. This subjective side is not the ultimate or the absolute; the true is that which is not merely subjective. If I possess a hundred dollars, I have them actually, and at the same time I form a conception of them to myself. But according to Kant’s representation we come to a deadlock at the difference; dualism is ultimate, and each side has independent validity as an absolute. Against this false idea of what is to be absolute and ultimate, the healthy human understanding is directed; every ordinary consciousness rises above it, every action aims at setting aside a subjective conception and making it into something objective. There is no man so foolish as that philosophy; when a man feels hungry, he does not call up the imagination of food, but sets about satisfying his hunger. All activity is a conception which does not yet exist, but whose subjectivity is abrogated. Moreover the imaginary hundred dollars become real, and the real ones imaginary: this is a frequent experience, this is their fate; it depends on circumstances entirely outward whether a hundred dollars become my property or not. Of course the mere conception is of no good, if I obstinately hold by it: for I can imagine what I will, but that does not make it exist. The only important point is what I conceive to myself, and then whether I think or comprehend the subjective and Being; by means of this each passes into the other. Thought, the Notion, of necessity implies that the Notion does not remain subjective; this subjective is on the contrary abrogated and reveals itself as objective. Now that unity is expressly affirmed by Descartes solely in reference to the Notion of God, for it is just that which is God; he speaks of no hundred dollars, as these are not an existence which has a Notion in itself. That opposition does away with itself absolutely and entirely, i.e. the finite passes away; it holds good only in the philosophy of finitude. If, therefore, there is not a Notion of existence formed, we have in it a notionless, sensuous object of perception; and what is notionless is certainly not a Notion,—therefore sensation, handling, are not Notions. Such existence has of course no Absolute, no real essence: or such existence has no truth, it is only a vanishing moment. This useless thrashing of the empty grainless straw of the common logic is termed philosophizing: it is like Issachar the strong ass, which could not be made to move from the spot where it was (Gen. xlix. 14). People of this kind say: We are good for nothing, and because we are good for nothing, we are good for nothing, and wish to be good for nothing. But it is a very false idea of Christian humility and modesty to desire through one’s abjectness to attain to excellence; this confession of one’s own nothingness is really inward pride and great self-conceit. But for the honour of true humility we must not remain in our misery, but raise ourselves above it by laying hold of the Divine.

The fact to which Kant clings most strongly (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 467) is this, that Being cannot be extracted from the Notion. The result of this is the proposition that to have the thought of the Infinite is certainly Reason; but that from the Idea of Reason is separated determination in general, and especially the determination which is known as Being. The Ideas of Reason cannot be proved from experience, or obtain from it their verification: if they are defined by means of categories, contradictions arise. If the Idea in general is to be defined as existent only, it is nothing more or less than the Notion; and the Being of the existent is still distinguished from it. This result, however, so highly important with reference to knowledge of the understanding, Kant does not, with reference to Reason, carry further than to say that Reason has on its own account nothing but formal unity for the methodical systematization of the knowledge of the understanding. Abstract thinking is adhered to; it is said that the understanding can only bring about order in things; but order is nothing in and for itself, it is only subjective. There therefore remains nothing for Reason except the form of its pure identity with itself, and this extends no further than to the arranging of the manifold laws and relations of the understanding, the classes, kinds and species which the understanding discovers. I, as Reason or conception, and the things external to me, are both absolutely different from one another; and that, according to Kant, is the ultimate standpoint. The animal does not stop at this standpoint, but practically brings about unity. This is the critique of theoretical Reason which Kant gives, and in which he states the a priori and determinate character of Reason in itself, without bringing it to the determinateness of individuality.

Mention should still be made of the positive philosophy or metaphysics, which Kant sets a priori above objective existence, the content of the object of experience, nature; we have here his natural philosophy, which is a demonstration of the universal conceptions of Nature. But this is on the one hand very scanty and restricted in content, containing as it does sundry general qualities and conceptions of matter and motion, and with regard to the scientific side or the a priori, as Kant calls it, it is likewise altogether unsatisfactory. For Kant assumes all such conceptions as that matter has motion and also a power of attraction and repulsion, instead of demonstrating their necessity. The “Principles of Natural Philosophy” have nevertheless been of great service, inasmuch as at the commencement of a philosophy of nature, attention was called to the fact that physical science employs thought-determinations without further investigation; and these determinations constitute the real foundations of its objects. Density, for instance, is looked on by physical science as a variable quantity, as a mere quantum in space: instead of this Kant asserted it to be a certain degree of occupation of space, i.e. energy, intensity of action. He demands accordingly (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, pp. 65-68) a construction of matter from powers and activities, not from atoms; and Schelling still holds to this without getting further. Kant’s work is an attempt to think, i.e. to demonstrate the determinations of thought, whose product consists of such conceptions as matter; he has attempted to determine the fundamental Notions and principles of this science, and has given the first impulse to a so-called dynamic theory of Nature.

“Religion within pure Reason” is also a demonstration of dogmas as aspects of Reason, just as in Nature. Thus in the positive dogmas of religion, which the Aufklärung (the clearing-up)—or the Ausklärung (the clearing-out)—made short work of, Kant called to remembrance Ideas of Reason, asking what rational and, first of all, what moral meaning lies in that which men call dogmas of religion, e.g. original sin. He is much more reasonable than the Ausklärung, which thinks it beneath its dignity to speak of such matters. These are the principal points in respect to the theoretical part of Kant’s philosophy.

2. The second subject of review in Kant’s philosophy is the practical sphere, the nature and principle of the will; this subject is dealt with in the Critique of Practical Reason, in which Kant accepted Rousseau’s conclusion that the will is absolutely free. Kant’s idea of theoretic Reason is that when Reason relates itself to an object, this object must be given to it; but when the object is given by Reason to itself, it has no truth; and Reason in knowledge of this kind does not arrive at independence. As practical, on the contrary, Reason is independent in itself; as a moral Being man is free, raised above all natural law and above all phenomena. As the theoretic Reason had in itself categories, a priori distinctions, so practical Reason has in turn the moral law in general, the further determinations of which are constituted by the notions of duty and right, lawful and unlawful; and here Reason disdains all the given material which was necessary to it on the theoretic side. The will determines itself within itself; all that is right and moral rests on freedom; in this man has his absolute self-consciousness. On this side self-consciousness finds essential reality in itself, as theoretical Reason found it in an “other”; and in the first place, indeed, the ego in its individuality is immediate reality, universality, objectivity; in the second place subjectivity strives after reality, but not after sensuous reality such as we had before, for here Reason holds itself to be the real. Here we have the Notion which is sensible of its own deficiency; this theoretic Reason could not be, as in it the Notion had to remain the Notion. Thus we have the standpoint of absoluteness revealed, since there is an infinite disclosed within the human breast. The satisfying part in Kant’s philosophy is that the truth is at least set within the heart; and hence I acknowledge that, and that alone, which is in conformity with my determined nature.

a. Kant divides will into lower and higher faculties of desire; this expression is not inapt. The lower faculties of desire are impulses, inclinations, etc.; the higher faculty is the will as such, which has not external, individual aims, but universal. To the question what the principle of will that should determine man in his actions is, all sorts of answers have been given; for instance, self-love, benevolence, happiness, etc. Such material principles of action, Kant now says, are all reducible to impulses, to happiness; but the rational in itself is purely formal, and consists in the maxim that what is to hold good as law, must be capable of being thought of as a law of universal application, without destroying itself. All morality of action now rests upon the conviction that the act is done with consciousness of the law, for the sake of the law and out of respect for the law and for itself, without any regard to what makes for happiness. As a moral Being man has the moral law in himself, the principle of which is freedom and autonomy of the will; for the will is absolute spontaneity. Determinations which are taken from the inclinations are heterogeneous principles as regards the will; or the will is heteronomy if it takes such determinations as its end and aim; for in that case it takes its determinations from something else than itself. But the essence of the will is to determine itself from itself; for practical Reason gives itself laws. But the empirical will is heteronomous, for it is determined by desires; and they belong to our nature, not to the realm of freedom.

It is a highly important point in the Kantian philosophy that what self-consciousness esteems reality, law, and implicit Being, is brought back within itself. While a man is striving after this aim and that, according as he judges the world or history in one way or the other, what is he to take as his ultimate aim? For the will, however, there is no other aim than that derived from itself, the aim of its freedom. It is a great advance when the principle is established that freedom is the last hinge on which man turns, a highest possible pinnacle, which allows nothing further to be imposed upon it; thus man bows to no authority, and acknowledges no obligations, where his freedom is not respected. Great popularity has from one point of view been won for Kantian philosophy by the teaching that man finds in himself an absolutely firm, unwavering centre-point; but with this last principle it has come to a standstill. While the highest pinnacle of the theoretic Reason is abstract identity, because it can furnish only a canon, a rule for abstract classifications, practical Reason, as law-giving, is immediately regarded as concrete; the law which it gives to itself is the moral law. But even if it is stated that it is concrete in itself, there is the further consideration that this freedom is at first only the negative of everything else; no bond, nothing external, lays me under an obligation. It is to this extent indeterminate; it is the identity of the will with itself, its at-homeness with itself. But what is the content of this law? Here we at once come back to the lack of content. For the sole form of this principle is nothing more or less than agreement with itself, universality; the formal principle of legislation in this internal solitude comes to no determination, or this is abstraction only. The universal, the non-contradiction of self, is without content, something which comes to be reality in the practical sphere just as little as in the theoretical. The universal moral law Kant therefore expresses thus (and the setting up of such a universal form was at all times the demand of the abstract understanding): “Act from maxims” (the law is also to be my particular law), “which are capable of becoming universal laws.”

Thus for the determination of duty (for the question which meets us is, what is duty for the free will) Kant has contributed nothing but the form of identity, which is the law of abstract Understanding. To defend one’s fatherland, to promote the happiness of another, is a duty, not because of the content, but because it is duty; as with the Stoics, what was thought was true for the very reason that, and in so far as it was thought (Vol. II., pp. 254, 260, 263). The content as such is indeed not what holds good universally in the moral law, because it contradicts itself. For benevolence, for instance, enjoins: “Give your possessions to the poor,” but if all give away what they have, beneficence is done away with (Vol. I., pp. 417, 418). Even with abstract identity, however, we do not get a step further, for every content which is put into this form is by being so put freed from self-contradiction. But nothing would be lost if it were not put into this form at all. With regard to property, for instance, the law of my actions is this: Property ought to be respected, for the opposite of this cannot be universal law. That is correct, but it is quite a formal determination: If property is, then it is. Property is here presupposed, but this determination may also in the same way be omitted, and then there is no contradiction involved in theft: If there is no such thing as property, then it is not respected. This is the defect in the principle of Kant and Fichte, that it is really formal; chill duty is the final undigested lump left within the stomach, the revelation given to Reason.

The first postulate in practical Reason is thus free, independent will which determines itself, but this concrete is still abstract. The second and third are forms which remind us that the will is concrete in a higher sense.

b. The second point is the connection of the Notion of the will with the particular will of the individual; the concrete is here the fact that my particular will and the universal will are identical, or that I am a moral human being. The unity, that man should be moral, is postulated; but beyond the “should” and this talk of morality, no advance is made. It is not said what is moral; and no thought is given to a system of the self-realizing spirit. For really, as theoretic Reason stands opposed to the objective of the senses, so practical Reason stands opposed to the practical sensuousness, to impulses and inclinations. Perfected morality must remain a Beyond; for morality presupposes the difference of the particular and universal will. It is a struggle, the determination of the sensuous by the universal; the struggle can only take place when the sensuous will is not yet in conformity with the universal. The result is, therefore, that the aim of the moral will is to be attained in infinite progress only; on this Kant founds (Kritik der prakt. Vernunft, pp. 219-223) the postulate of the immortality of the soul, as the endless progress of the subject in his morality, because morality itself is incomplete, and must advance into infinitude. The particular will is certainly something other than the universal will; but it is not ultimate or really permanent.

c. The third point is the highest concrete, the Notion of the freedom of all men, or the natural world has to be in harmony with the Notion of freedom. That is the postulate of the existence of God, whom Reason, however, does not recognize. Will has the whole world, the whole of the sensuous, in opposition to it, and yet Reason insists on the unity of Nature or the moral law, as the Idea of the Good, which is the ultimate end of the world. Since, however, it is formal, and therefore has no content on its own account, it stands opposed to the impulses and inclinations of a subjective and an external independent Nature. Kant reconciles the contradiction of the two (Kritik der prakt. Vernunft, pp. 198-200) in the thought of the highest Good, in which Nature is conformed to rational will, and happiness to virtue;—a harmony which does not enter into the question at all, although practical reality consists therein. For happiness is only one’s own sensuous consciousness, or the actuality of a particular individual, not universal reality in itself. The unification spoken of itself therefore remains only a Beyond, a thought, which is not actually in existence, but only ought to be. Kant (Kritik der prakt. Vernunft, pp. 205-209) thus agrees entirely with the talk which alleges that in this world it often fares ill with the good, and well with the wicked, and so on; and he postulates further the existence of God as the Being, the causality, through whom this harmony comes to pass, on behalf both of the sanctity of the moral law, and of the rational end to be attained in Nature, but only in infinite progress; which postulate, like that of the immortality of the soul, allows the contradiction to remain as it is all the time, and expresses only in the abstract that the reconciliation ought to come about. The postulate itself is always there, because the Good is a Beyond with respect to Nature; the law of necessity and the law of liberty are different from one another, and placed in this dualism. Nature would remain Nature no longer, if it were to become conformed to the Notion of the Good; and thus there remains an utter opposition between the two sides, because they cannot unite. It is likewise necessary to establish the unity of the two; but this is never actual, for their separation is exactly what is presupposed. Kant employs popular language thus: evil ought to be overcome, but yet must not have been overcome. God is to him, therefore, only a faith, an opinion, which is only subjectively, and not absolutely true. This result is also of a very popular character.

These postulates express nothing but the synthesis, devoid of thought, of the different moments which contradict each other on every hand; they are therefore a “nest” of contradictions. For instance, the immortality of the soul is postulated on account of imperfect morality, i.e. because it is infected with sensuousness. But the sensuous is implied in moral self-consciousness; the end, perfection, is what really destroys morality as such. Similarly the other aim, the harmony of the sensuous and the rational, to an equal extent abrogates morality; for that consists in this very opposition of Reason to the sensuous. The actuality of the God who produces harmony is of such a character that it does not enter into consciousness at all; it is accepted by consciousness for the sake of harmony, just as children make some kind of scarecrow, and then agree with each other to pretend to be afraid of it. The ground on which God is accepted—that by the conception of a holy law-giver the moral law may acquire additional reverence—contradicts the fact that morality really consists in reverence for the law simply for its own sake. In Practical Reason self-consciousness esteems itself to be implicit Being, as contrasted with theoretic Reason, which assigns implicitude to objective existence, but the one, we see, attains just as little as the other to unity and actuality in itself. It is hard for man to believe that Reason actually exists: but there is nothing real except Reason; it is the absolute power. The vanity of man aspires to have an ideal before him, in order to be able to find fault with everything alike. We possess all wisdom, it is within us, but is not forthcoming. That is the ultimate standpoint; it is a high standpoint, no doubt, but in it the truth is never reached. The absolute Good remains “what ought to be,” or without objectivity; and there it has to remain.

3. There is still left for us to consider the third side in Kant’s philosophy, the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, in which the demand for the concrete comes in, the demand that the Idea of unity spoken of before should be established not as a Beyond, but as present; and this side is of special importance. Kant says that the understanding no doubt regulates in the theoretic sphere and produces categories; but these remain mere general determinations, beyond which lies the particular (the other element which belongs to every item of knowledge). The two are distinguished from one another for the understanding; for its distinctions remain in universality. In the practical sphere Reason is certainly the implicit, but its free independence, its law-giving freedom in higher form, is opposed to Nature in its freedom or to Nature’s own laws. “In the theoretic sphere Reason can draw conclusions from given laws through syllogisms, only by means of the understanding, and these conclusions never get beyond Nature; it is only in the practical sphere that Reason itself gives laws. Understanding and” (practical) “Reason have two different regulative systems on one and the same ground of experience, without the one being detrimental to the other. For if the Notion of Nature has but little influence on the giving of laws by the Notion of Freedom, just as little does the latter interfere with the legislation of Nature. The possibility of the existence side by side of the two regulative systems and of the powers belonging to them was proved in the Critique of pure Reason.” (!?) “Now if a unity is not constituted by these two different spheres, which certainly do not put a limit on each other in their regulative action, but do so incessantly in their operations in the sensuous world” (i.e. where they encounter each other), “the reason is this, that the Notion of Nature represents its objects in perception, not as things in themselves, but as mere phenomena, while the Notion of Freedom, on the other hand, represents in its object a thing in itself, no doubt, but not in perception. Consequently neither of them can attain to a theoretic knowledge of its object (and even of the thinking subject) as a thing-in-itself, which last would be the supersensuous, an unlimited and inaccessible realm for our whole faculty of knowledge. Now truly there is fixed a gulf over which the eye cannot reach, between the realm of the Notion of Nature, as the sensuous, and the realm of the Notion of Freedom, as the supersensuous, so that it is not possible to pass from the one to the other, since it is just as if there were two different worlds, the first of which could have no influence on the second. Nevertheless the latter is conceived as having an influence on the former, or, in other words, freedom is conceived as having for its mission the realization in the sensuous world of the end indicated by the laws of freedom. Consequently Nature must be so conceived that, while in form it realizes its own laws, there may yet be a possibility of ends being realized in it according to the laws of freedom. Therefore there must surely be some ground for the unity of the supersensuous which lies at the foundation of Nature with that which the Notion of Freedom practically contains, the Notion of which ground of unity, although it attains neither theoretically nor practically to a knowledge of the same, and consequently has no peculiar province, yet makes possible the transition from the mode of thought in accordance with the principles of the one, to the mode of thought in accordance with the principles of the other. Between Understanding and Reason there now comes the Faculty of Judgment, as between the powers of knowledge and desire there come pleasure and its opposite; in this faculty must therefore lie the transition from the province of the Notions of Nature to the province of the Notion of Freedom.”

Adaptation to ends has its place here, i.e. a particular reality, which is determined only through the universal, the end. The understanding is the ground of this unity of the manifold; the sensuous is therefore here determined by means of the supersensuous. This idea of a universal which implicitly contains the particular is according to Kant the precise object of the faculty of judgment, which he divides as follows:—“If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given, the faculty of judgment which subsumes the particular under that universal, is determinative,”—the immediate faculty of judgment. But here there is also a particular which is not determined by species. “If, however, only the particular is given, for which the faculty of judgment has to find the universal, it is reflective.” The reflective judgment has as its principle the unity of particularity and the abstract universal of the understanding, the idea of a legal necessity which is at the same time free, or of a freedom which is directly one with its content. “This principle can be no other but the fact that since universal laws of Nature have their foundation in our understanding, which prescribes them to nature, although only according to their general conception, the particular, empirical laws, in so far as they are undetermined by universal laws, must be viewed as containing that unity which they would contain if they had been given by some intelligence—other, it may be, than our own—with express reference to our cognitive faculties, in order to render possible a system of experience according to particular natural laws. It is not as if such an intelligence must be assumed (for it is only the reflective faculty of judgment to which this idea serves as principle): this faculty gives a law only to itself, not to Nature in addition. Now the conception of an object (if it at the same time contains the ground of the reality of this object), the end, and the harmony of a thing with that quality of things which is only possible in conformity with ends, are termed the adaptation to purpose of the form; therefore the principle of the faculty of judgment in respect to the form of the things of Nature under empirical laws in general is the adaptability to purpose of Nature in its multiplicity. That is to say, Nature is represented by this Notion as if an intelligence contained the ground of the unity in multiplicity of Nature’s empirical laws.”

Aristotle already regarded Nature as in itself showing this adaptation to end, and as having in itself νοῦς, intelligence, the Universal, so that in undivided unity one element is moment of another (v. Vol. II. pp. 156-162). Purpose is the Notion, and immanent; not external form and abstraction as distinguished from a fundamental material, but penetrating, so that all that is particular is determined by this universal itself. According to Kant this is Understanding: no doubt the laws of the Understanding, which it implicitly has in knowledge, leave the objective still undetermined, but because this manifold itself must have a connection in itself, which is yet contingent for human intelligence, “the faculty of judgment must assume as a principle for its own use that what is contingent for us contains a unity, which for us indeed is not knowable, but yet thinkable, in the connection of the manifold with an implicitly possible experience.” This principle hereby at once falls back again into the subjectivity of a thought, and is only a maxim of our reflection, by which nothing is to be expressed regarding the objective nature of the object, because Being-in-itself is once for all fixed outside of self-consciousness, and the Understanding is conceived only in the form of the self-conscious, not in its becoming another.

Now this principle of the reflective faculty of judgment is in itself a two-fold adaptation to end, the formal and the material; the faculty of judgment is thus either æsthetic or teleological: of these the former has to do with subjective, the latter with objective, logical adaptation to end. There are thus two objects of the faculty of judgment—the beautiful in works of art and the natural products of organic life—which make known to us the unity of the Notion of Nature and the Notion of Freedom. The consideration of these works involves the fact, that we see a unity of the Understanding and the particular. But as this consideration is only a subjective manner of representing such products, and does not contain the truth of the same, such things are regarded only according to this unity, and they are not in themselves of this nature; what they are in themselves lies beyond.

a. The Beautiful of the æsthetic faculty of judgment consists in the following: “Pleasure and displeasure are something subjective, which can in no way become a part of knowledge. The object has adaptation to end only to the extent that its conception is directly bound up with the feeling of pleasure; and this is an æsthetic conception. The taking up of forms into the imaginative faculty can never occur without the reflecting faculty of judgment at least comparing them, even unintentionally, by means of its power of relating perceptions to Notions.” Now if in this comparison the imaginative faculty (as a faculty of perceptions a priori?) “is, by means of a conception given”—something beautiful,—“unintentionally placed in agreement with the Understanding, as the faculty of Notions, and thereby a feeling of pleasure is awakened, the object must then be looked on as in conformity with end for the reflecting faculty of judgment. Such a judgment regarding the adaptability to end of the object, a judgment which is grounded on no previous Notion of the object, and furnishes no Notion of it, is an æsthetic judgment. An object whose form (not the material of its conception as sensation) is judged to be a cause of the pleasure which springs from the conception of such an object, is beautiful,”—the first reasonable thing said about beauty. The sensuous is one moment of the Beautiful, but it must also express the spiritual, a Notion. “The Beautiful is what is conceived without” subjective “interest,” but similarly also “without Notions” (i.e. determinations of reflection, laws) “as object of a universal pleasure. It is related to no inclination, therefore the subject feels itself quite free therein. It is not beautiful for me. The end is the object of a Notion, so far as the latter is looked on as the cause of the former” (the object); “and the causality of a Notion in respect to its object is adaptation to end.” To the ideal belongs “the Idea of reason, which makes the aims of humanity, as far as they cannot be sensuously conceived, the principle of judgment of a form through which these aims reveal themselves as their effect in the phenomenon. The ideal we may expect to find revealed only in human form.”

The sublime is the effort to give sensuous expression to an Idea in which the inconceivability of the Idea, and the impossibility of finding an adequate expression of it by means of the sensuous, are clearly evidenced. Here in the æsthetic faculty of judgment we see the immediate unity of the universal and the particular; for the Beautiful is this very unity, without Notion and immediate. Because Kant, however, places it in the subject, it is limited, and as æsthetic it also ranks lower, inasmuch as it is not the unity as Notion.

b. The other manner of bringing harmony to pass is the teleological way of regarding Nature, which is found in the objective and material adaptation to end. Here the immediate unity of the Notion and reality is looked upon as objective in the organic products of Nature—this being the purpose of Nature, containing in its universality the particular, in its particularity the species. But such a mode of consideration must be practised not externally, but in conformity with internal teleology. In external adaptation to end one thing has its end in another: “Snow protects the sown crops in cold lands from frost, and facilitates the intercourse of men by permitting of sleighing.” Internal adaptation to end signifies, on the contrary, that a thing is in itself end and means, its end is not therefore beyond itself. In the contemplation of the living creature we do not remain at the point of having something sensuous before us, which according to the categories of the Understanding is only brought into relation to something other than itself; for we regard it as cause of itself, as producing itself. This is the self-preservation of the living creature; as an individual it is no doubt perishable, but in living it produces itself, although for that purpose certain conditions are requisite. The end or purpose of Nature is therefore to be sought for in matter, to the extent that matter is an inwardly organized product of nature, “in which all is end, and all in turn is means;” because all the members of the organism are at the same time means and end, it is an end in itself. That is the Aristotelian Notion—the infinite that returns into itself, the Idea.

Kant at this point calls to mind the following: “We should find no difference between natural mechanism and the technique of Nature, i.e. the connection of ends in the same, were our Understanding not of such a kind that it must pass from the universal to the particular, and the faculty of judgment can therefore pronounce no determining sentences, without having a universal law under which it may subsume the particular. Now the particular as such contains a contingent element in regard to the universal, but nevertheless Reason also demands unity in the connection of particular laws of Nature, and consequently a regulative character, which character when found in the contingent is termed adaptation to end: and the derivation of particular laws from universal is, in regard to the element of contingency which those particular laws contain, a priori impossible through the determination of the Notion of the object; the Notion of the adaptation to end of Nature in its products becomes thus a Notion necessary for the human faculty of judgment, but not affecting the determination of the objects themselves, and therefore a subjective principle.” An organic Being is therefore, according to Kant (Kritik der Urtheilskraft, p. 354) one in which natural mechanism and end are identical. We regard it as if there dwelt in the sensuous a Notion which brings the particular into conformity with itself. In the organic products of Nature we perceive this immediate unity of the Notion and reality; for in a living creature there is perceived in one unity the soul, or the universal, and existence or particularity, which is not the case with inorganic Nature. Thus there enters into the Kantian philosophy the conception of the concrete, as that the universal Notion determines the particular. But Kant took these Ideas again in a subjective sense only, as guiding thoughts for the faculty of judgment, by which no Being-in-itself can be expressed; and thus, although he expresses the unity of the Notion and reality, he yet lays fresh emphasis on the side of the Notion. He will not therefore throw off his limitations in the moment in which he assumes them as limitations. This is the perpetual contradiction in Kant’s philosophy: Kant exhibited the extremes of opposition in their one-sidedness, and expressed also the reconciliation of the contradiction; Reason postulates unity, and this we have also in the faculty of judgment. Kant, however, says (Kritik der Urtheilskraft, pp. 355-363): This is only a mode of our reflecting faculty of judgment, life itself is not so; we are merely accustomed so to regard it. In art it is thus certainly the sensuous mode which gives us the conception of the Idea; reality and ideality are here directly in one. But at this point also Kant says that we must remain at what is one-sided, at the very moment when he is passing out beyond it. The wealth of thought therefore still unfolds itself with Kant in subjective form alone; all fulness, all content, concentrates in conceiving, thinking, postulating. The objective, according to Kant, is only what is in itself; and we know not what Things-in-themselves are. But Being-in-itself is only the caput mortuum, the dead abstraction of the “other,” the empty, undetermined Beyond.

The reason why that true Idea should not be the truth is therefore that the empty abstractions of an understanding which keeps itself in the abstract universal, and of a sensuous material of individuality standing in opposition to the same, are presupposed as the truth. Kant no doubt expressly advances to the conception of an intuitive or perceiving understanding, which, while it gives universal laws, at the same time determines the particular; and the determination thus given is deep; it is the true concrete, reality determined by the indwelling Notion, or, as Spinoza says, the adequate Idea. For “to knowledge there also belongs intuitive perception, and the possession of a perfect spontaneity of intuition would be a faculty of knowledge” specifically “distinct from the sensuous, and quite independent thereof, and therefore it would be understanding in the most universal sense. Consequently it is possible to think of an intuitive understanding which does not pass from the universal to the particular, and thus proceed through conceptions to the individual—an understanding in which we do not meet with the contingency of the harmony of Nature in her products, according to particular laws, with the understanding, a contingency which makes it so hard for our understanding to bring” together “into the unity of knowledge the manifold of Nature.” But that this “intellectus archetypus” is the true Idea of the understanding, is a thought which does not strike Kant. Strange to say, he certainly has this idea of the intuitive; and he does not know why it should have no truth—except because our understanding is otherwise constituted, namely such “that it proceeds from the analytic universal to the particular.” But absolute Reason and Understanding in itself, as we have already seen (pp. 432, 461), are, in Kant’s view, of such a nature that they have no reality in themselves: the Understanding requires material to work upon, theoretic Reason spins cobwebs of the brain, practical Reason has to allow its reality to come to an end with its postulates. In spite of their directly and definitely expressed non-absoluteness, they are yet looked on as true knowledge; and intuitive Understanding, which holds Notion and sensuous perception in one unity, is looked on as a mere thought which we make for ourselves.

c. The highest form in which the conception of the concrete comes into Kant’s philosophy is this, that the end is grasped in its entire universality; and thus it is the Good. This Good is an Idea; it is my thought; but there exists the absolute demand that it should be realized also in the world, that the necessity of Nature should correspond with the laws of freedom, not as the necessity of an external Nature, but through what is right and moral in human life, through life in the State,—or in other words that the world in general should be good. This identity of the Good and reality is the demand of practical Reason; but subjective Reason cannot realize this. In every good action a man no doubt accomplishes something good, but this is only limited; universal Good, as the final object of the world, can be attained to only through a third. And this power over the world, which has as its final object the Good in the world, is God. Thus the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment also ends with the postulate of God. Now, although the particular laws of Nature, as independent individual relations, have no relation to the Good, Reason consists in having and desiring unity as the essential or substantial in itself. The opposition of these two, the Good and the world, is contrary to that identity; Reason must therefore demand that this contradiction should be abrogated, that there should be a power which is good on its own account, and is a Power over Nature. This is the position which God assumes in Kant’s philosophy: no proof is possible, he says, of God’s existence, but the demand is there. The deficiency here is the impossibility of proving God’s existence, and it consists in this, that if we admit Kant’s dualism, it cannot be shown how the Good as abstract Idea in itself is the abrogating of its Idea as abstract; and how the world in itself is the abrogating of itself in its externality, and in its diversity from the Good—this being done in order that both may reveal themselves to be their truth, which in respect to them appears as the Third, but is at the same time determined as the First. Thus, therefore, according to Kant (Kritik der Urtheilskraft, pp. 460, 461), God can only be believed in. We associate the faith of Jacobi with this; for in this point Kant agrees with Jacobi.

If now, in accordance with this standpoint of Kant and Jacobi, God is believed in, and we admit this standpoint for an instant, there is certainly a return to the Absolute. But the question remains: What is God? To define Him as supersensuous is not much, nor is it more to say He is universal, abstract, absolute. What then is His determination? Were we here, however, to pass over to determinations of the Absolute, the evil result would follow, as far as this standpoint is concerned, that we should pass over to knowledge; for this signifies knowledge of an object which is in itself concrete, i.e. determined. But here the furthest point reached is the general statement that God exists with the determination of being infinite, universal, indeterminate. God cannot be known in this way; for in order to be known He must as concrete possess at least two determinations. In this way mediation would be established, for a knowledge of the concrete is at once a mediate knowledge. But this standpoint lacks mediation, and thus remains at the immediate. Paul, in speaking to the Athenians, appeals to the altar which they had dedicated to the Unknown God, and declares to them what God is; but the standpoint indicated here takes us back to the Unknown God. All the life of Nature, as of Spirit, is mediation in itself; and to this mediation the philosophy of Schelling now passed on.

If we sum up the Kantian philosophy, we find on all hands the Idea of Thought, which is in itself the absolute Notion, and has in itself difference, reality. In the theoretic and practical Reason it has only abstract difference, but in the Faculty of Judgment, as the unity of the two, Kant goes so far as to establish the difference as actual, establishing not only particularity, but also individuality. But, to be sure, this Philistine conception proceeds from our human faculty of knowledge, which is valid for him in its empirical form, notwithstanding his statement that it does not know the truth, and his further description of the true idea of the same as being merely a thought which we possess. Therefore actuality counts as something sensuous, empirical, for the comprehension of which Kant takes the categories of the Understanding, giving them the same validity as they have in every-day life. This is a complete philosophy of the Understanding, which renounces Reason: the reason why it became so popular was the negative one, that men were once for all free from the old metaphysic. According to Kant something sensuous is produced, having thought-determinations, which, however, is not the thing, for if a man, for instance, feels something hard, Kant says: “I feel hardness, but I do not feel Something.” Kant’s philosophy thus ends with a dualism, with the relation which is a plainly essential “ought,” with the unreconciled contradiction. It is otherwise with Jacobi’s faith; he finds the conception of God as immediate existence, and all mediation is untrue for him. With Kant, therefore, the result is: “We know only phenomena;” with Jacobi, on the other hand, it is: “We know only the finite and conditioned.” Over these two results there has been unmingled joy among men, because the sloth of Reason (Heaven be praised!) considered itself liberated from every call to reflect, and now, being saved the trouble of penetrating to its own inward meaning and exploring the depths of Nature and Spirit, it could very well leave itself alone. The further result attending this is the autocracy of the subjective Reason, which, seeing that it is abstract and without knowledge, has only subjective certainty and not objective truth. The second cause of rejoicing was the concession to freedom of a perfect right, which I can neither understand nor justify, and need not do so; my subjective liberty of conviction and certainty holds good all round. The third cause of joy was added by Jacobi, who said that it amounted even to a crime to seek to know the truth, because the infinite was thereby only rendered finite. Truth is in a bad way, when all metaphysic is done away with, and the only philosophy acknowledged is not a philosophy at all!

But besides the general idea of synthetic judgments a priori, a universal which has difference in itself, Kant’s instinct carried this out in accordance with the scheme of triplicity, unspiritual though that was, in the whole system into which for him the entire universe was divided. This he not only practised in the three critiques, but he also followed it out in most of the sub-divisions under the categories, the ideas of Reason, &c. Kant has therefore set forth as a universal scheme the rhythm of knowledge, of scientific movement; and has exhibited on all sides thesis, antithesis and synthesis, modes of the mind by means of which it is mind, as thus consciously distinguishing itself. The first is existence, but in the form of Other-Being for consciousness; for what is only existence is object. The second is Being-for-self, genuine actuality; here the reverse relation enters in, for self-consciousness, as the negative of Being-in-itself, is itself reality. The third is the unity of the two; the absolute, self-conscious actuality is the sum of true actuality, into which are re-absorbed both the objective and the independently existent subjective. Kant has thus made an historical statement of the moments of the whole, and has correctly determined and distinguished them: it is a good introduction to Philosophy. The defect of Kant’s philosophy consists in the falling asunder of the moments of the absolute form; or, regarded from the other side, our understanding, our knowledge, forms an antithesis to Being-in-itself: there is lacking the negative, the abrogation of the “ought,” which is not laid hold of. But thought and thinking had become once for all an absolute requisite that could no longer be set aside. It was consequently in the first place demanded by consistency that particular thoughts should appear as if produced of necessity from the original unity of the ego, and in that way justified. But, in the second place, thought had spread itself over the world, had attached itself to everything, investigated everything, introduced its forms into everything, and systematized everything, so that on every hand thought-determinations had to be followed, instead of any mere feeling or routine or practical common-sense, or what is evidenced in the extraordinary lack of understanding on the part of so-called practical men. And therefore in theology, in governments and their legislation, in the object aimed at by the state, in trades and in mechanics, it is said that men ought to act according to universal determinations, i.e. rationally: and men even talk of a rational brewery, a rational brick-kiln, etc. This is the requisite of concrete thought; while in the Kantian result, which is that of phenomenon, an empty thought was alone present. It is verily also the essence of revealed religion to know what God is. There was, therefore, to be found a yearning desire for content, for truth, since man could not possibly return to the condition of a brute, nor yet sink to the form of sensation, so that this yearning was for him the only thing that held good with regard to the higher life. The first requirement—consistency—Fichte sought to satisfy; the other—content—Schelling strove to fulfil.

C. FICHTE.

Fichte created a great sensation in his time; his philosophy is the Kantian philosophy in its completion, and, as we must specially notice, it is set forth in a more logical way. He does not pass beyond the fundamentals of Kant’s philosophy, and at first regarded his own philosophy as no more than a systematic working out of the other. In addition to these systems of philosophies, and that of Schelling, there are none. Any that pretend to be such merely pick out something from these, and over this they fight and wrangle among themselves. Ils se sont battus les flancs, pour être de grands hommes. For in those times there were in Germany many systems of philosophy, such as those of Reinhold, Krug, Bouterweck, Fries, Schulze, &c.; but in them there is only an extremely limited point of view, combined with boastfulness—a strange medley of stray thoughts and conceptions or facts which I find within me. But their thoughts are all derived from Fichte, Kant, or Schelling—that is in so far as there are thoughts there present at all. Or else some slight modification is added, and this for the most part merely consists in making the great principles barren, what points in them were living are destroyed, or else subordinate forms are changed, whereby another principle is said to be set forth, though when we look closer we find that these principles are but the principles of one of those philosophies that have gone before. This may serve as a justification for my not speaking further of all these philosophies; any exposition of them would be no more than a demonstration that everything in them is taken from Kant, Fichte, or Schelling, and that the modification in form is only the semblance of a change, while really it indicates a deterioration in the principles of those philosophies.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born on the 19th of May, 1762, at Rammenau, near Bischoffswerda, in Upper Lusatia. He studied at Jena, and for some time was a private tutor in Switzerland. He wrote a treatise on Religion, termed a “Critique of all Revelation,” where the Kantian phraseology is employed throughout—so much so that it was thought to be the work of Kant. After this he was in 1793 summoned to Jena by Goethe as Professor of Philosophy, which appointment he, however, resigned in the year 1799, on account of an unpleasantness which had arisen through his essay “On the ground of our Belief in a Divine Government of the World.” For Fichte published a journal in Jena, and a paper in it which was by someone else was regarded as atheistical. Fichte might have kept silence, but he published the above-mentioned essay as an introduction to the article. The authorities wished an investigation to be made into the matter. Then Fichte wrote a letter which contained threats, and respecting it Goethe said that a Government ought not to allow itself to be threatened. Fichte now taught privately for some time in Berlin; in 1805 he became professor at Erlangen, and in 1809 at Berlin, at which place he died on the 27th January, 1814. We cannot here deal more particularly with the details of his life.

In what is termed the philosophy of Fichte a distinction must be made between his properly-speaking speculative philosophy, in which the argument is most consistently worked out, and which is less well known, and his popular philosophy, to which belong the lectures delivered in Berlin before a mixed audience, and, for example, the work termed a “Guidance to a Blessed Life.” These last have much in them that is affecting and edifying—many who call themselves the disciples of Fichte know this side alone—and they are expressed in language most impressive to a cultured, religious temperament. In the history of Philosophy, however, such cannot be taken into consideration, although through their matter they may have the highest possible value; the content has to be speculatively developed, and that is done in Fichte’s earlier philosophic works alone.

1. THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF FICHTE’S PHILOSOPHY.

As we mentioned above (p. 478), the shortcoming in the Kantian philosophy was its unthinking inconsistency, through which speculative unity was lacking to the whole system; and this shortcoming was removed by Fichte. It is the absolute form which Fichte laid hold of, or in other words, the absolute form is just the absolute Being-for-self, absolute negativity, not individuality, but the Notion of individuality, and thereby the Notion of actuality; Fichte’s philosophy is thus the development of form in itself. He maintained the ego to be the absolute principle, so that from it, the direct and immediate certainty of self, all the matter in the universe must be represented as produced; hence, according to Fichte, reason is in itself a synthesis of Notion and actuality. But this principle he once more in an equally one-sided manner set aside; it is from the very beginning subjective, conditioned by an opposite, and its realization is a continual rushing onward in finitude, a looking back at what has gone before. The form in which it is presented has also the disadvantage, and indeed, the real drawback of bringing the empiric ego ever before one’s eyes, which is absurd, and quite distracting to one’s point of view.

The claims of Philosophy have advanced so far that in the first place self-consciousness refuses any longer to regard absolute essence as immediate substance which does not in itself possess difference, reality, and actuality. Against this substance self-consciousness ever struggled, for it does not find its explicit Being there, and consequently feels the lack of freedom. But besides this it demanded that this essence, objectively presented, should be personal, living, self-conscious, actual, and not shut up in abstract metaphysical thoughts alone. On the other hand consciousness, for which the other is, demanded the moment of external actuality, Being as such, into which thought must pass, truth in objective existence; and this is what we more especially noticed in connection with the English. This Notion, which is immediately actuality, and this actuality which is immediately its Notion, and that indeed in such a way that there neither is a third thought above this unity, nor is it an immediate unity which does not possess difference, separation, within it, is the ego; it is the self-distinction of opposites within itself. That whereby it distinguishes itself from the simplicity of thought, and distinguishes this other, is likewise immediately for it; it is identical with, or not distinguished from it. Hence it is pure thought, or the ego is the true synthetic judgment a priori, as Kant called it. This principle is apprehended actuality, for the taking back of the other-Being into self-consciousness is just apprehension. The Notion of the Notion is from this point of view found in the fact that in what is apprehended self-consciousness has the certainty of itself; what is not apprehended is something foreign to it. This absolute Notion or this absolutely existent infinitude it is which has to be developed in knowledge, and its distinction as the whole distinction of the universe has to be represented from itself, and this has in its distinction to remain reflected within itself in equal absoluteness. Nothing other than the ego anywhere exists, and the ego is there because it is there; what is there is only in the ego and for the ego.

Now Fichte merely set forth this Notion; he did not bring it to a scientific realization from itself. For to him this Notion maintains and asserts itself as this Notion; it has absoluteness for him in so far as it is merely the unrealized Notion, and thus indeed comes once more into opposition with reality. The Fichtian philosophy has the great advantage of having set forth the fact that Philosophy must be a science derived from one supreme principle, from which all determinations are necessarily derived. The important point is this unity of principle and the attempt to develop from it in a scientifically consistent way the whole content of consciousness, or, as has been said, to construct the whole world. Beyond this no progress was made. But the great necessity in Philosophy is to possess one living Idea; the world is a flower which is eternally produced from one grain of seed. Thus Fichte does not, like Kant, throw his work into narrative form because he begins with the ego; but he has proceeded further, inasmuch as he sought to bring about a construction of determinations of knowledge from the ego. The whole extent of knowledge in all the world must be developed, and further this knowledge must be the consequence of the development of determinations; but because Fichte says that what is not for us does not concern us, he has not grasped this principle of the ego as Idea, but solely in the consciousness of the activity which we exercise in knowing, and consequently it is still laid hold of in the form of subjectivity.

Thus as Kant treats of cognition [Erkennen], so Fichte sets forth real knowledge [Wissen]. Fichte states that the task of Philosophy is to find a theory of knowledge; universal knowledge is both the object and the starting-point of Philosophy. Consciousness knows, that is its nature; the end of philosophic learning is the knowledge of this knowledge. Hence Fichte called his philosophy the Theory of Knowledge (Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, p. 18), the science of knowledge. That is to say ordinary consciousness as the active ego finds this and that, occupies itself, not with itself, but with other objects and interests, but the necessity that I bring forth determinations, and which determinations—cause and effect, for example,—lies beyond my consciousness: I bring them forth instinctively and cannot get behind my consciousness. But when I philosophize, I make my ordinary consciousness itself my object, because I make a pure category my consciousness: I know what my ego is doing, and thus I get behind my ordinary consciousness. Fichte thus defines Philosophy as the artificial consciousness, as the consciousness of consciousness.

a. Where Fichte in his system has attained the highest degree of determinateness, he begins, as we saw Kant did before (pp. 437, 438), from the transcendental unity of self-consciousness; in it I—as this—am one, this unity is to Fichte the same and the original. Ego is there a fact, says Fichte, but not yet a proposition. As proposition, as principle, the ego must not remain barren, nor be accepted as one, for to a proposition pertains a synthesis. Now Fichte proceeds in his system from the fact that Philosophy must begin with an absolutely unconditioned, certain principle, with something indubitably certain in ordinary knowledge. “It cannot be proved or defined, because it must be absolutely the first principle.” According to Wendt’s account (Tennemann’s Grundriss, § 393, pp. 494, 495) Fichte gives an exposition of the necessity of such a principle as follows: “Scientific knowledge is a system of cognition obtained through a supreme principle which expresses the content and form of knowledge. The theory of knowledge is the science of knowledge which sets forth the possibility and validity of all knowledge, and proves the possibility of principles in reference to form and content, the principles themselves, and thereby the connection existing in all human knowledge. It must have a principle which can neither be proved from it nor from another science; for it is supreme. If there is a theory of knowledge there also is a system; if there is a system there is also a theory of knowledge and an absolute first principle—and so on through an inevitable circle.”

The simple principle of this knowledge is certainty of myself, which is the relation of me to myself; what is in me, that I know. The supreme principle, as immediate and not derived, must be certain on its own account; that is, a determination of the ego only, for it is only from the ego that I cannot abstract. Fichte thus begins, like Descartes, with ‘I think, therefore I am,’ and he expressly brings this proposition to mind. The Being of the ego is not a dead, but a concrete Being; but the highest Being is thought. Ego, as an explicitly self-existent activity of thought, is thus knowledge, even if it is only abstract knowledge, as in the beginning at least it cannot help being. At the same time Fichte begins from this absolute certainty with quite other necessities and demands; for from this ego not only Being but also the larger system of thought has to be derived (supra, p. 230). According to Fichte, the ego is the source of the categories and ideas, but all conceptions and thoughts are a manifold reduced to a synthesis through Thought. Thus while with Descartes in connection with the ego other thoughts appear which we simply find already in us, such as God, nature, &c., Fichte sought for a philosophy entirely of a piece, in which nothing empiric was to be admitted from without. With this reflection a false point of view was at once introduced, namely that contained in the old conception of knowledge, of commencing with principles in this form and proceeding from them; so that the reality which is derived from such a principle is brought into opposition with it, and hence in truth is something different, i.e. it is not derived: or that principle for this same reason expresses only the absolute certainty of itself and not the truth. The ego is certain, it cannot be doubted; but Philosophy desires to reach the truth. The certainty is subjective, and because it is made to remain the basis, all else remains subjective also without there being any possibility of this form being removed. Fichte now analyzes the ego, reducing it to three principles from which the whole of knowledge has to be evolved.

α. The first proposition must be simple, in it predicate and subject must be alike; for were they unlike, their connection—since in accordance with their diversity the determinations are not directly one—would have to be first of all proved by means of a third. The first principle must thus be identical. Fichte now proceeds further to distinguish in this first principle the form and content; but in order that this same may be immediately true through itself, form and content must be again the same, and the principle conditioned by neither. It signifies A = A, the abstract undetermined identity; that is the proposition of contradiction, wherein A is an indifferent content. Fichte says, “Thought is by no means essence, but only a particular determination of Being; there are outside of it many other determinations of our Being. I merely remark this, that when ‘I am’ is overstepped, Spinozism is necessarily reached. Its unity is something which ought to be produced through us, but which cannot be so; it is not anything that is.” The first proposition is then that I am identical with myself, Ego = Ego; that undoubtedly is the definition of the ego. The subject and the predicate are the content; and this content of the two sides is likewise their relation, i.e. form. Relation requires two sides; the relating and the related are here, however, the same; for on account of the simplicity of the ego, there is nothing but a relation of the ego to the ego. I have knowledge of myself; but in so far as I am consciousness, I know of an object which is different from me, and which is then likewise mine. But the ego is in such a way identical with its difference that what is different is immediately the same, and what is identical is likewise different; we have a difference without a difference. Self-consciousness is not dead identity, or non-Being, but the object which is identical with me. This is immediately certain; all else must be as certain to me, inasmuch as it must be my relation to myself. The content must be transformed into the ego, so that in it I have my determination alone. This principle is at first abstract and deficient, because in it no difference, or a formal difference only is expressed; whereas the principle should possess a content: a subject and a predicate are indeed distinguished in it, but only for us who reflect upon it, i.e. in itself there is no difference, and consequently no true content. In the second place, this principle is indeed the immediate certainty of self-consciousness, but self-consciousness is likewise consciousness, and in it there is likewise the certainty that other things exist to which it stands in an attitude of opposition. In the third place, that principle has not the truth in it, for the very reason that the certainty of itself possessed by the ego has no objectivity; it has not the form of the differentiated content within it—or it stands in opposition to the consciousness of an “other”.

β. Now in order that determination should come to pass, i.e. a content and difference, it is essential for Fichte that a second principle should be established, which in regard to form is unconditioned, but the content of which is conditioned, because it does not belong to the ego. This second principle, set forth under the first, is, “I assert a non-ego in opposition to the ego,” and in this something other than absolute self-consciousness is set forth. To this pertains the form therein present, relation; but the content is the non-ego, another content from the ego. We might say that through this content the proposition is independent, since the negative therein is an absolute, as truly as the reverse—that it is independent through the form of opposition which cannot be derived from the original. Here, then, we have no more to do with derivation, although this derivation of opposition from the first proposition was all the same demanded. Inasmuch as I posit another in opposition to the ego, I posit myself as not posited; this non-ego is the object generally, i.e. that which is opposed to me. This other is the negative of the ego; thus when Fichte called it the non-ego he was expressing himself in a very happy, suitable, and consistent manner. There has been a good deal of ridicule cast on the ego and non-ego; the expression is new, and therefore to us Germans it seems strange at first. But the French say Moi and Non-moi, without finding anything laughable in it. In this principle the positing belongs, however, to the ego; but because the non-ego is independent of the ego, we have two sides, and self-consciousness relates itself to another. This second proposition thus signifies that I posit myself as limited, as non-ego; but non-ego is something quite new to be added. On the one side we thus have before us a field which is merely appropriated from the ego; and in this way we have before us the non-ego as our object.

γ. To these is added yet a third proposition, in which I now make this division into ego and non-ego: it is the synthetic principle, the proposition of ground, which in content is unconditioned, just as in the second was the case in regard to form. This third proposition is the determination of the first two through one another, in such a way that the ego limits the non-ego. “In and through the ego both the ego and the non-ego are posited as capable of being mutually limited by means of one another, i.e. in such a way that the reality of the one abrogates the reality of the other.” In limitation both are negated, but “only in part”; only thus are synthesis and deduction possible. I posit the non-ego, which is for me, in myself, in my identity with myself; thus I take it from its non-identity, its not-being-I, that is to say I limit it. This limitation of the non-ego Fichte expresses thus: “I place in opposition to the ego,” and indeed “to the divisible ego, a divisible non-ego.” The non-ego I destroy as a complete sphere, which it was according to the second principle, and posit it as divisible; I likewise posit the ego as divisible in so far as the non-ego is present in it. The whole sphere which I have before me is supposed indeed to be the ego, but in it I have not one but two. The proposition of ground is thus the relation of reality and negation, i.e. it is limitation; it contains the ego limited by the non-ego, and the non-ego limited by the ego. Of this synthesis there is nothing, properly speaking, contained in the two earlier propositions. Even this first presentation of the three principles does away with the immanence of real knowledge. Thus the presentation is here also subject to an opposite from the first, as it is with Kant, even if these are two acts of the ego merely, and we remain entirely in the ego.

Now that limitation may take place for me in two different ways: at one time the one is passive, at another time the other is so. In this limitation the ego may posit the non-ego as limiting and itself as limited, in such a way that the ego posits itself as requiring to have an object; I know myself indeed as ego, but determined by the non-ego; non-ego is here active and ego passive. Or, on the other hand, the ego, as abrogating other-being, is that which limits, and non-ego is the limited. I know myself then as clearly determining the non-ego, as the absolute cause of the non-ego as such, for I can think. The first is the proposition of the theoretic reason, of intelligence: the second the proposition of practical reason, of will. The will is this, that I am conscious of myself as limiting the object; thus I make myself exercise activity upon the object and maintain myself. The theoretic proposition is that the object is before me and it determines me. The ego is, since I perceive, a content, and I have this content in me, which is thus outside of me. This is on the whole the same thing as we meet with in the experience of Kant: it comes to the same thing whether it is by matter or the non-ego that the ego is here determined.

b. In the theoretic consciousness the ego, although the assertive generally, finds itself limited by the non-ego. But it is identical with itself; hence its infinite activity ever sets itself to abrogate the non-ego and to bring forth itself. Now the different methods whereby the ego sets forth itself are the different methods of its activity; these we have to understand in their necessity. But since philosophic knowledge is the consideration of consciousness itself (supra, p. 483), I can only know knowledge, the act of the ego. Fichte thus appeals to consciousness, postulates ego and non-ego in their abstraction, and since philosophic knowledge is the consciousness of consciousness, it is not sufficient that I should find its determinations in consciousness, for I produce them with consciousness. Common consciousness, indeed, likewise brings forth all the determinations of the ordinary conception and of thought, but without—on the theoretic side at least—having any knowledge of it; for it is the fact of being limited alone that is present to it. Thus, when I see a large square object, such as a wall, my ordinary consciousness accepts these determinations as they are given to it; the object is. In so doing I do not think of seeing, but of the object; seeing, however, is my activity, the determinations of my faculty of sensation are thus posited through me. The ego as theoretic is, indeed, aware in philosophic consciousness that it is the ego which posits; but here it posits that the non-ego posits somewhat in me. The ego thus posits itself as that which is limited by the non-ego. I make this limitation mine; thus is it for me in me, this passivity of the ego is itself the activity of the ego. As a matter of fact, all reality which appears in the object for the ego is a determination of the ego, just as the categories and other determinations were in Kant’s case. Thus it is here more especially that we should expect Fichte to demonstrate the return of other-Being into absolute consciousness. However, because after all the other-Being was regarded as unconditioned, as implicit, this return does not come to pass. The ego determines the ‘other,’ indeed, but this unity is an altogether finite unity; non-ego has thus immediately escaped from determination once more and gone forth from this unity. What we find is merely an alternation between self-consciousness and the consciousness of another, and the constant progression of this alternation, which never reaches any end.

The development of theoretic reason is the following-out of the manifold relationships between the ego and non-ego; the forms of this limitation which Fichte now goes through are the determinations of the object. These particular thought-determinations he calls categories, and he seeks to demonstrate them in their necessity; from the time of Aristotle onwards no one had thought of so doing. The first of these forms is the determination of reciprocity, which we already met with in the third proposition: “By the determination of the reality or negation of the ego, the negation or reality of the non-ego is equally determined;” the two in one is reciprocal action. In the second place, “Causality is the same degree of activity in the one as of passivity in the other.” In so far as something is considered as the reality of the non-ego, the ego is considered as passive, and, on the other hand, in so far as ‘I’ am real, the object is passive; this relation, that the passivity of the object is my activity or reality, and the opposite, is the conception of Causality. “As many parts of negation as the ego posits in itself, so many parts of reality it posits in the non-ego; it therefore posits itself as self-determining in so far as it is determined, and as suffering determination in so far as it determines itself. In so far,” in the third place, “as the ego is regarded as embracing the whole absolutely determined realm of all reality, it is substance; on the other hand when it is posited in a not absolutely determined sphere of this realm, in so far there is an accidence in the ego.” That is the first rational attempt that has ever been made to deduce the categories; this progress from one determination to another is, however, only an analysis from the standpoint of consciousness, and is not in and for itself.

The ego is so far the ideal ground of all conceptions of the object; all determination of this object is a determination of the ego. But in order that it may be object, it must be placed in opposition to the ego, i.e. the determinations set forth through the ego are another, the non-ego; this placing of the object in opposition is the real ground of conceptions. The ego is, however, likewise the real ground of the object; for it is likewise a determination of the ego that the non-ego as object is set in opposition to the ego. Both, the real ground and the ideal ground of the conception, are thus one and the same. Regarding the ego as ideal principle and the non-ego as real principle, Krug has likewise talked a great deal of nonsense. Regarded from the one point of view, the ego is active and the non-ego purely passive; while from the other side the ego is passive and the object active and operative. But since the ego in the non-philosophic consciousness does not have the consciousness of its activity in the conception of the object, it represents to itself its own activity as foreign, i.e. as belonging to the non-ego.

We here see the opposition adopting various forms: ego, non-ego; positing, setting in opposition; two sorts of activity of the ego, &c. The fact that I represent is undoubtedly my activity, but the matter of main importance is the content of the positing and its necessary connection through itself. If one occupies oneself only with this content, that form of subjectivity which is dominant with Fichte, and which remains in his opposition, disappears. As the ego is affirmative and determining, there now is in this determination a negative likewise present; I find myself determined and at the same time the ego is like itself, infinite, i.e. identical with itself. This is a contradiction which Fichte indeed endeavours to reconcile, but in spite of it all he leaves the false basis of dualism undisturbed. The ultimate, beyond which Fichte does not get, is only an ‘ought,’ which does not solve the contradiction; for while the ego should be absolutely at home with itself, i.e. free, it should at the same time be associated with another. To Fichte the demand for the solution of this contradiction thus adopts the attitude of being a demanded solution only, of signifying that I ever have to destroy the barriers, that I ever have to reach beyond the limitation into utter infinitude, and that I ever find a new limit; a continual alternation takes place between negation and affirmation, an identity with self which again falls into negation, and from this negation is ever again restored. To speak of the bounds of human reason is, however, an unmeaning form of words. That the reason of the subject is limited is comprehensible from the nature of the case, but when we speak of Thought, infinitude is none other than one’s own relation to self, and not to one’s limit; and the place in which man is infinite is Thought. Infinitude may then be likewise very abstract, and in this way it is also once more finite; but true infinitude remains in itself.

Fichte further deduces the ordinary conception thus: the fact that the ego in going forth at once finds its activity checked by a limitation, and returns once more into itself, brings about two opposite tendencies in me, between which I waver, and which I try to unite in the faculty of imagination. In order that a fixed determination may exist between the two, I have to make the limit a permanent one, and we have that in the understanding. All further determinations of the object are, as categories of the understanding, modes of synthesis; but each synthesis is a new contradiction. New mediations are thus once more necessary, and these are new determinations. Thus Fichte says: I can always continue to determine the non-ego, to make it my conception, i.e. to take from it its negation as regards me. I have to deal with my activity alone; but there is always an externality therein present which still remains, and which is not explained by my activity. This Beyond which alone remains to the undetermined ego Fichte calls the infinite check upon the ego, with which it ever has to deal, and beyond which it cannot get; thus the activity which proceeds into infinitude finds itself checked and driven back by this repulsive force, and then it reacts upon itself. “The ego in its self-determination has been considered both as determining and determined; if we reflect on the fact that the absolutely determined determining power must be an absolutely indeterminate, and further, that ego and non-ego are absolutely opposed to one another, in the one case ego is the indeterminate and in the other case non-ego.”

Inasmuch as the ego here makes the object its conception and negates it, this philosophy is Idealism, in which philosophy all the determinations of the object are ideal. Everything determinate which the ego possesses it has through its own positing; I even make a coat or a boot because I put them on. There remains only the empty repulsive force, and that is the Kantian Thing-in-itself, beyond which even Fichte cannot get, even though the theoretic reason continues its determination into infinitude. “The ego as intelligence” ever “remains dependent on an undetermined non-ego; it is only through this that it is intelligence.” The theoretic side is thus dependent. In it we have not therefore to deal with the truth in and for itself, but with a contingent, because ego is limited, not absolute, as its Notion demands: intelligence is not here considered as spirit which is free. This is Fichte’s standpoint as regards the theoretic side.

c. Practical reason comes next; the point of view from which it starts is that “The ego posits itself as determining the non-ego.” Now the contradiction has thus to be solved of ego being at home with itself, since it determines its Beyond. The ego is thus infinite activity, and, as ego = ego, the absolute ego, it is undoubtedly abstract. But in order to have a determination, a non-ego must exist; ego is thus activity, causality, the positing of the non-ego. But as with Kant sensuousness and reason remain opposed, the same contradiction is present here, only in a more abstract form, and not in the rude empiricism of Kant. Fichte here turns and twists in all sorts of ways, or he gives the opposition many different forms; the crudest form is that ego is posited as causality, for in it another is necessitated on which it exercises its activity. “The absolute ego has accordingly to be” now “the cause of the non-ego, i.e. only of that in the non-ego which remains when we abstract from all demonstrable forms of representation or conception—of that to which is ascribed the check given to the infinitely operative activity of the ego; for the fact that the intelligent ego is, in accordance with the necessary laws of the conception, the cause of the particular determinations of that which is conceived as such, is demonstrated in the theoretic science of knowledge.” The limits of intelligence must be broken through, the ego must alone be active; the other side, the infinite repulsion, must be removed, in order that the ego may be liberated.

“According to our hypothesis the ego must now posit a non-ego absolutely, and without any ground, i.e. absolutely and without any ground it must limit or in part not posit itself.” This, indeed, it already does as intelligent. “It must therefore have the ground of not positing itself” only “in itself.” The ego is, however, just the ego, it posits itself, “it must” therefore “have the principle of positing itself within it, and also the principle of not positing itself. Hence the ego in its essence would be contradictory and self-repellent; there would be in it a two-fold or contradictory principle, which assumption contradicts itself, for in that case there would be no principle within it. The ego would” consequently “not exist, for it would abrogate itself. All contradictions are reconciled through the further determination of contradictory propositions. The ego must be posited in one sense as infinite, and in another as finite. Were it to be posited as infinite and finite in one and the same sense, the contradiction would be insoluble; the ego would not be one but two. In so far as the ego posits itself as infinite, its activity is directed upon itself and on nothing else but itself. In so far as the ego posits limits, and itself in these limits, its activity is not exercised directly on itself, but on a non-ego which has to be placed in opposition,” upon another and again upon another, and so on into infinitude; that is the object, and the activity of the ego “is objective activity.” In this way Fichte in the practical sphere also remains at opposition, only this opposition now has the form of two tendencies in the ego, both of which are said to be one and the same activity of the ego. I am called upon to proceed to determine the other in relation to which I am negative, the non-ego, in accordance with my freedom; it has indeed all determinations through the activity of the ego, but beyond my determination the same non-ego ever continues to appear. The ego clearly posits an object, a point of limitation, but where the limitation is, is undetermined. I may transfer the sphere of my determination, and extend it to an infinite degree, but there always remains a pure Beyond, and the non-ego has no positive self-existent determination.

The last point in respect of the practical sphere is hence this, that the activity of the ego is a yearning or striving—like the Kantian “ought”; Fichte treats this with great prolixity. The Fichtian philosophy consequently has the same standpoint as the Kantian; the ultimate is always subjectivity, as existent in and for itself. Yearning, according to Fichte, is divine; in yearning I have not forgotten myself, I have not forgotten that I possess a superiority in myself; and therefore it is a condition of happiness and satisfaction. This infinite yearning and desire has then been regarded as what is highest and most excellent in the Beautiful, and in religious feelings likewise; and with it is connected the irony of which we have spoken before (Vol. I. pp. 400, 401). In this return the ego is merely an effort, on its side it is fixed, and it cannot realize its endeavours. Striving is thus an imperfect or implicitly limited action. The ultimate result is consequently a “circle” which cannot be broken through, so that “the finite spirit must necessarily posit an absolute outside itself (a thing-in-itself), and yet on the other hand it must recognize that this same is only there for it (a necessary noumenon).” To put it otherwise, we see the ego absolutely determined in opposition only, we see it only as consciousness and self-consciousness which does not get beyond this, and which does not reach so far as to Spirit. The ego is the absolute Notion in so far as it does not yet reach the unity of thought, or in this simplicity does not reach difference, and in motion does not have rest; that is to say, in so far as positing, or the pure activity of the ego, and setting in opposition, are not by it comprehended as the same. Or the ego does not comprehend the infinite repulsion, the non-ego; self-consciousness determines the non-ego, but does not know how to make this Beyond its own.

The deficiency in the Fichtian philosophy is thus firstly that the ego retains the significance of the individual, actual self-consciousness, as opposed to that which is universal or absolute, or to the spirit in which it is itself a moment merely; for the individual self-consciousness simply signifies standing apart as far as another is concerned. Hence, if the ego was ever called absolute existence, the most terrible offence was given, because really the ego only came before us as signifying the individual subject as opposed to the universal.

In the second place, Fichte does not attain to the idea of Reason as the perfected, real unity of subject and object, or of ego and non-ego; it is only, as with Kant, represented as the thought of a union in a belief or faith, and with this Fichte likewise concludes (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, p. 301). This he worked out in his popular writings. For because the ego is fixed in its opposition to the non-ego, and is only as being opposed, it becomes lost in that unity. The attainment of this aim is hence sent further and further back into the false, sensuous infinitude: it is a progression implying just the same contradiction as that found in Kant, and having no present actuality in itself; for the ego has all actuality in its opposition only. The Fichtian philosophy recognizes the finite spirit alone, and not the infinite; it does not recognize spirit as universal thought, as the Kantian philosophy does not recognize the not-true; or it is formal. The knowledge of absolute unity is apprehended as faith in a moral disposition of the world, an absolute hypothesis in accordance with which we have the belief that every moral action that we perform will have a good result. As in Kant’s case, this Idea belongs to universal thought. “In a word, when anything is apprehended it ceases to be God; and every conception of God that is set up is necessarily that of a false God. Religion is a practical faith in the moral government of the world; faith in a supersensuous world belongs, according to our philosophy, to the immediate verities.” Fichte thus concludes with the highest Idea, with the union of freedom and nature, but a union of such a nature that, immediately regarded, it is not known; the opposition alone falls within consciousness. This union of faith he likewise finds in the Love of God. As believed and experienced, this form pertains to Religion, and not to Philosophy, and our only possible interest is to know this in Philosophy. But with Fichte it is still associated with a most unsatisfying externality of which the basis is the non-Idea, for the one determination is essential only because the other is so, and so on into infinitude. “The theory of knowledge is realistic—it shows that the consciousness of finite beings can only be explained by presupposing an independent and wholly opposite power, on which, in accordance with their empirical existence, they themselves are dependent. But it asserts nothing more than this opposed power, which by finite beings can merely be felt and not known. All possible determinations of this power or of this non-ego which can come forth into infinity in our consciousness, it pledges itself to deduce from the determining faculties of the ego, and it must actually be able to deduce these, so certainly as it is a theory of knowledge. This knowledge, however, is not transcendent but transcendental. It undoubtedly explains all consciousness from something independent of all consciousness, but it does not forget that this independent somewhat is again a product of its own power of thought, and consequently something dependent on the ego, in so far as it has to be there for the ego. Every thing is, in its ideality, dependent upon the ego; but in its reality even the ego is dependent. The fact that the finite spirit must posit for itself somewhat outside of itself, which last exists only for it, is that circle which it may infinitely extend but never break through.” The further logical determination of the object is that which in subject and object is identical, the true connection is that in which the objective is the possession of the ego; as thought, the ego in itself determines the object. But Fichte’s theory of knowledge regards the struggle of the ego with the object as that of the continuous process of determining the object through the ego as subject of consciousness, without the identity of the restfully self-developing Notion.

Thirdly, because the ego is thus fixed in its one-sidedness, there proceeds from it, as representing one extreme, the whole of the progress that is made in the content of knowledge; and the deduction of the philosophy of Fichte, cognition in its content and form, is a progression from certain determinations to others which do not turn back into unity, or through a succession of finitenesses which do not have the Absolute in them at all. The absolute point of view, like an absolute content, is wanting. Thus the contemplation of nature, for instance, is a contemplation of it as of pure finitenesses from the point of view of another, as though the organic body were regarded thus: “Consciousness requires a sphere entirely its own for its activity. This sphere is posited through an original, necessary activity of the ego, in which it does not know itself as free. It is a sensuous perception, a drawing of lines; the sphere of activity thereby becomes something extended in space. As quiescent, continuous, and yet unceasingly changing, this sphere is matter, which, as body, has a number of parts which in relation to one another are called limbs. The person can ascribe to himself no body without positing it as being under the influence of another person. But it is likewise essential that I should be able to check this same influence, and external matter is also posited as resisting my influences on it, i.e. as a tough, compact matter.” These tough matters must further be separated from one another—the different persons cannot hold together like one mass of dough. For “my body is my body and not that of another; it must further operate and be active without my working through it. It is only through the operation of another that I can myself be active and represent myself as a rational being who can be respected by him. But the other being should treat me immediately as a rational being, I should be for him a rational being even before my activity begins. Or my form must produce an effect through its mere existence in space, without my activity, i.e. it must be visible. The reciprocal operation of rational beings must take place without activity; thus a subtle matter must be assumed in order that it may be modified by means of the merely quiescent form. In this way are deduced first Light and then Air.” This constitutes a very external manner of passing from one step to another, resembling the method of the ordinary teleology, which makes out, for instance, that plants and animals are given for the nourishment of mankind. This is how it is put: Man must eat, and thus there must be something edible—consequently plants and animals are at once deduced; plants must have their root in something, and consequently the earth is forthwith deduced. What is altogether lacking is any consideration of the object as what it is in itself; it is plainly considered only in relation to another. In this way the animal organism appears as a tough, tenacious matter which is “articulated” and can be modified; light is a subtle matter which is the medium of communication of mere existence, &c.—just as in the other case plants and animals are merely edible. As regards a philosophic consideration of the content there is nothing at all to be found.

Fichte likewise wrote both a Science of Morals and of Natural Rights, but he treats them as sciences pertaining to the understanding only, and his method of procedure is destitute of ideas and carried on by means of a limited understanding. The Fichtian deduction of the conceptions of justice and morality thus remains within the limitations and rigidity of self-consciousness, as against which Fichte’s popular presentations of religion and morality present inconsistencies. The treatise on Natural Rights is a special failure, e.g. where he, as we have just seen (p. 502), deduces even nature just as far as he requires it. The organization of the state which is described in Fichte’s Science of Rights is furthermore as unspiritual as was the deduction of natural objects just mentioned, and as were many of the French constitutions which have appeared in modern times—a formal, external uniting and connecting, in which the individuals as such are held to be absolute, or in which Right is the highest principle. Kant began to ground Right upon Freedom, and Fichte likewise makes freedom the principle in the Rights of Nature; but, as was the case with Rousseau, it is freedom in the form of the isolated individual. This is a great commencement, but in order to arrive at the particular, they have to accept certain hypotheses. The universal is not the spirit, the substance of the whole, but an external, negative power of the finite understanding directed against individuals. The state is not apprehended in its essence, but only as representing a condition of justice and law, i.e. as an external relation of finite to finite. There are various individuals; the whole constitution of the state is thus in the main characterized by the fact that the freedom of individuals must be limited by means of the freedom of the whole. The individuals always maintain a cold attitude of negativity as regards one another, the confinement becomes closer and the bonds more stringent as time goes on, instead of the state being regarded as representing the realization of freedom.

This philosophy contains nothing speculative, but it demands the presence of the speculative element. As the philosophy of Kant seeks in unity its Idea of the Supreme Good, wherein the opposites have to be united, so the Fichtian philosophy demands union in the ego and in the implicitude of faith; in this self-consciousness in all its actions makes its starting-point conviction, so that in themselves its actions may bring forth the highest end and realize the good. In the Fichtian philosophy nothing can be seen beyond the moment of self-consciousness, of self-conscious Being-within-self, as in the philosophy of England we find expressed—in just as one-sided a way—the moment of Being-for-another, or of consciousness, and that not as a moment simply, but as the principle of the truth; in neither of the two is there the unity of both—or spirit.

Fichte’s philosophy constitutes a significant epoch in Philosophy regarded in its outward form. It is from him and from his methods that abstract thought proceeds, deduction and construction. Hence with the Fichtian philosophy a revolution took place in Germany. The public had penetrated as far as the philosophy of Kant, and until the Kantian philosophy was reached the interest awakened by Philosophy was general; it was accessible, and men were curious to know about it, it pertained to the ordinary knowledge of a man of culture (supra, p. 218). Formerly men of business, statesmen, occupied themselves with Philosophy; now, however, with the intricate idealism of the philosophy of Kant, their wings droop helpless to the ground. Hence it is with Kant that we first begin to find a line of separation which parts us from the common modes of consciousness; but the result, that the Absolute cannot be known, has become one generally acknowledged. With Fichte the common consciousness has still further separated itself from Philosophy, and it has utterly departed from the speculative element therein present. For Fichte’s ego is not merely the ego of the empiric consciousness, since general determinations of thought such as do not fall within the ordinary consciousness have likewise to be known and brought to consciousness; in this way since Fichte’s time few men have occupied themselves with speculation. Fichte, it is true, in his later works especially, wrote with a view to meeting the popular ear as we may see in the “Attempt to force the reader into comprehension,” but this end was not accomplished. The public was through the philosophy of Kant and Jacobi strengthened in its opinion—one which it accepted utiliter—that the knowledge of God is immediate, and that we know it from the beginning and without requiring to study, and hence that Philosophy is quite superfluous.

2. FICHTE’S SYSTEM IN A RE-CONSTITUTED FORM.

The times called for life, for spirit. Now since mind has thus retreated within self-consciousness, but within self-consciousness as a barren ego, which merely gives itself a content or a realization through finitenesses and individualities which in and for themselves are nothing, the next stage is found in knowing this realization of self-consciousness in itself, in knowing the content in itself as a content which, penetrated throughout by spirit, is self-conscious and spiritual, or a spirit full of content. In his later popular works Fichte thus set forth faith, love, hope, religion, treating them without philosophic interest, and as for a general public: it was a philosophy calculated to suit enlightened Jews and Jewesses, councillors and Kotzebues. He places the matter in a popular form: “It is not the finite ego that is, but the divine Idea is the foundation of all Philosophy; everything that man does of himself is null and void. All existence is living and active in itself, and there is no other life than Being, and no other Being than God; God is thus absolute Being and Life. The divine essence likewise comes forth, revealing and manifesting itself—the world.” This immediate unity of the self-conscious ego and its content, or spirit, which merely has an intuition of its self-conscious life and knows it as the truth immediately, manifested itself subsequently in poetic and prophetic tendencies, in vehement aspirations, in excrescences which grew out of the Fichtian philosophy.

3. THE MORE IMPORTANT OF THE FOLLOWERS OF FICHTE.

On the one hand, in respect of the content which the ego reaches in the philosophy of Fichte, the complete absence of spirituality, the woodenness, and, to put it plainly, the utter foolishness therein evidenced, strike us too forcibly to allow us to remain at his standpoint; our philosophic perception likewise tells us of the one-sidedness and deficiencies of the principle, as also of the evident necessity that the content should prove to be what it is. But on the other hand self-consciousness was therein posited as reality or essence—not as a foreign, alien self-consciousness, but as ego—a signification which all possess, and which finds an answer in the actuality of all. The Fichtian standpoint of subjectivity has thus retained its character of being unphilosophically worked out, and arrived at its completion in forms pertaining to sensation which in part remained within the Fichtian principle, while they were in part the effort—futile though it was—to get beyond the subjectivity of the ego.

a. FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL.

In Fichte’s case the limitation is continually re-appearing; but because the ego feels constrained to break through this barrier, it reacts against it, and gives itself a resting-place within itself; this last ought to be concrete, but it is a negative resting-place alone. This first form, Irony, has Friedrich von Schlegel as its leading exponent. The subject here knows itself to be within itself the Absolute, and all else to it is vain; all the conclusions which it draws for itself respecting the right and good, it likewise knows how to destroy again. It can make a pretence of knowing all things, but it only demonstrates vanity, hypocrisy, and effrontery. Irony knows itself to be the master of every possible content; it is serious about nothing, but plays with all forms. The other side is this, that subjectivity has cast itself into religious subjectivity. The utter despair in respect of thought, of truth, and absolute objectivity, as also the incapacity to give oneself any settled basis or spontaneity of action, induced the noble soul to abandon itself to feeling and to seek in Religion something fixed and steadfast; this steadfast basis, this inward satisfaction, is to be found in religious sentiments and feelings. This instinct impelling us towards something fixed has forced many into positive forms of religion, into Catholicism, superstition and miracle working, in order that they may find something on which they can rest, because to inward subjectivity everything fluctuates and wavers. With the whole force of its mind subjectivity tries to apply itself to what is positively given, to bend its head beneath the positive, to cast itself, so to speak, into the arms of externality, and it finds an inward power impelling it so to do.

b. SCHLEIERMACHER.

On the other hand the ego finds in the subjectivity and individuality of the personal view of things the height of all its vanity—its Religion. All the various individualities have God within themselves. Dialectic is the last thing to arise and to maintain its place. As this is expressed for philosophic self-consciousness, the foreign intellectual world has lost all significance and truth for ordinary culture; it is composed of three elements, a deity pertaining to a time gone by, and individualized in space and existence, a world which is outside the actuality of self-consciousness, and a world which had yet to appear, and in which self-consciousness would first attain to its reality. The spirit of culture has deserted it, and no longer recognizes anything that is foreign to self-consciousness. In accordance with this principle, the spiritual living essence has then transformed itself into self-consciousness, and it thinks to know the unity of spirit immediately from itself, and in this immediacy to be possessed of knowledge in a poetic, or at least a prophetic manner. As regards the poetic manner, it has a knowledge of the life and person of the Absolute immediately, by an intuition, and not in the Notion, and it thinks it would lose the whole as whole, as a self-penetrating unity, were it not to express the same in poetic form; and what it thus expresses poetically is the intuition of the personal life of self-consciousness. But the truth is absolute motion, and since it is a motion of forms and figures [Gestalten], and the universe is a kingdom of spirits, the Notion is the essence of this movement, and likewise of each individual form; it is its ideal form and not the real one, or that of figure [Gestalt]. In the latter case necessity is lost sight of; individual action, life and heart, remain within themselves, and undeveloped; and this poetry vacillates betwixt the universality of the Notion and the determinateness and indifference of the figure; it is neither flesh nor fish, neither poetry nor philosophy. The prophetic utterance of truths which claim to be philosophical, thus belongs to faith, to self-consciousness, which indeed perceives the absolute spirit in itself, but does not comprehend itself as self-consciousness, since it places absolute reality above Knowledge, beyond self-conscious reason, as was done by Eschenmayer and Jacobi. This uncomprehending, prophetic manner of speech affirms this or that respecting absolute existence as from an oracle, and requires that each man should find the same immediately in his own heart. The knowledge of absolute reality becomes a matter pertaining to the heart; there are a number of would-be inspired speakers, each of whom holds a monologue and really does not understand the others, excepting by a pressure of the hands and betrayal of dumb feeling. What they say is mainly composed of trivialities, if these are taken in the sense in which they are uttered; it is the feeling, the gesture, the fulness of the heart, which first gives them their significance; to nothing of more importance is direct expression given. They outbid one another in conceits of fancy, in ardent poetry. But before the Truth vanity turns pale, spitefully sneering it sneaks back into itself. Ask not after a criterion of the truth, but after the Notion of the truth in and for itself; on that fix your gaze. The glory of Philosophy is departed, for it presupposes a common ground of thoughts and principles—which is what science demands—or at least of opinions. But now particular subjectivity was everything, each individual was proud and disdainful as regards all others. The conception of independent thought—as though there could be a thought which was not such (Vol. I. p. 60)—is very much the same; men have, it is said, to bring forth a particularity of their own, or else they have not thought for themselves. But the bad picture is that in which the artist shows himself; originality is the production of what is in its entirety universal. The folly of independent thought is that it results in each bringing forth something more preposterous than another.

c. NOVALIS.

Subjectivity signifies the lack of a firm and steady basis, but likewise the desire for such, and thus it evermore remains a yearning. These yearnings of a lofty soul are set forth in the writings of Novalis. This subjectivity does not reach substantiality, it dies away within itself, and the standpoint it adopts is one of inward workings and fine distinctions; it signifies an inward life and deals with the minutiæ of the truth. The extravagances of subjectivity constantly pass into madness; if they remain in thought they are whirled round and round in the vortex of reflecting understanding, which is ever negative in reference to itself.

d. FRIES, BOUTERWECK, KRUG.

Yet a last form of subjectivity is the subjectivity of arbitrary will and ignorance. It maintained this, that the highest mode of cognition is an immediate knowledge as a fact of consciousness; and that is so far right. The Fichtian abstraction and its hard understanding has a repellent effect on thought; slothful reason allowed itself to be told the result of the philosophy of Kant and Jacobi, and renounced all consistent thought, all construction. This arbitrariness gave itself entire liberty—the liberty of the Tabagie—but in doing so it regarded itself from a poetic or prophetic point of view, as we have just seen (pp. 508, 509). Then it was both more sober and more prosaic, and thus brought the old logic and metaphysic once more into evidence, though with this modification that they are made facts of consciousness. Thus Fries turns back to the faith of Jacobi in the form of immediate judgments derived from reason, and dark conceptions incapable of utterance. He wished to improve the critique of pure reason by apprehending the categories as facts of consciousness; anything one chooses can in such a case be introduced. Bouterweck speaks of “The virtue, the living nature of power; the fact that subject and object are regarded as one, that is as absolute virtue. With this absolute virtue we have all Being and action, namely the eternal, absolute and pure unity; in one word we have grasped the world within us and we have grasped ourselves in the world, and that indeed not through conceptions and conclusions, but directly through the power which itself constitutes our existence and our rational nature. To know the All, or indeed to know God in any way, is, however, impossible for any mortal.” Krug wrote a “Groundwork of Philosophy,” setting forth a “Transcendental Synthesis—that is a transcendental realism and a transcendental idealism inseparably bound together,” It is an “original, transcendental synthesis of the real and the ideal, the thinking subject and the corresponding outer world;” this transcendental synthesis must “be recognized and asserted without any attempt being made at explaining it.”

D. SCHELLING.

It was Schelling, finally, who made the most important, or, from a philosophic point of view, the only important advance upon the philosophy of Fichte; his philosophy rose higher than that of Fichte, though undoubtedly it stood in close connection with it; indeed, he himself professes to be a Fichtian. Now the philosophy of Schelling from the first admitted the possibility of a knowledge of God, although it likewise started from the philosophy of Kant, which denies such knowledge. At the same time Schelling makes Jacobi’s principle of the unity of thought and Being fundamental, although he begins to determine it more closely. To him concrete unity is this, that the finite is no more true than the infinite, the subjective idea no more than objectivity, and that combinations in which both untruths are brought together in their independence in relation to one another, are likewise combinations of untruths merely. Concrete unity can only be comprehended as process and as the living movement in a proposition. This inseparability is in God alone; the finite, on the other hand, is that which has this separability within it. In so far as it is a truth it is likewise this unity, but in a limited sphere, and for that reason in the separability of both moments.

Frederick Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, born on the 27th January, 1775, at Schorndorf, in Wurtemberg, studied in Leipzig and Jena, where he came to be on terms of great intimacy with Fichte. In the year 1807 he became secretary of the Academy of Science in Munich. We cannot with propriety deal fully with his life, for he is still living.

Schelling worked out his philosophy in view of the public. The series of his philosophic writings also represents the history of his philosophic development and the gradual process by which he raised himself above the Fichtian principle and the Kantian content with which he began. It does not thus contain a sequence of separately worked out divisions of Philosophy, but only successive stages in his own development. If we ask for a final work in which we shall find his philosophy represented with complete definiteness none such can be named. Schelling’s first writings are still quite Fichtian, and it is only by slow degrees that he worked himself free of Fichte’s form. The form of the ego has the ambiguity of being capable of signifying either the absolute Ego or God, or ego in my particularity; this supplied the first stimulus to Schelling. His first and quite short work of four sheets which he wrote in 1795 at Tubingen, while still at the university, was called, “On the Possibility of any Form of Philosophy”; it contains propositions respecting the Fichtian philosophy only. The next work, “On the Ego as principle of Philosophy, or on the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge” (Tubingen, 1795), is likewise quite Fichtian; in this case, however, it is from a wider and more universal point of view, since the ego is therein grasped as an original identity. We find, however, a summary of the Fichtian principle and the Kantian mode of presentation: “It is only by something being originally set in opposition to the ego, and by the ego being itself posited as the manifold (in time), that it is possible for the ego to get beyond the unity which belongs to it of merely being posited, and that, for example, it posits the same content on more than one occasion.” Schelling then passed on to natural philosophy, adopted Kantian forms and reflective determinations, such as those of repulsion and attraction, from Kant’s “Metaphysics of Nature,” and likewise dealt with quite empirical phenomena in expressions taken from Kant. All his first works on this subject come under this category, viz.: “Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature,” 1797; “On the World-Soul,” 1798, the second edition of which possesses appendices which are entirely inconsistent with what goes before. In the writings of Herder and Kielmeyer we find sensibility, irritability, and reproduction dealt with, as also their laws, such as that the greater the sensibility the less the irritability, &c.—just as the powers or potencies were dealt with by Eschenmayer. It was only later on in relation to these that Schelling first apprehended nature in the categories of thought, and made general attempts of a more definite character in the direction of greater scientific development. It was only through what had been accomplished by these men that he was enabled to come into public notice so young. The spiritual and intellectual side, morality and the state, he represented on the other hand purely in accordance with Kantian principles: thus in his “Transcendental Idealism,” although it was written from a Fichtian point of view, he goes no further than Kant did in his “Philosophy of Rights” and his work “On Eternal Peace.” Schelling, indeed, later on published a separate treatise on Freedom, deeply speculative in character; this, however, remains isolated and independent, and deals with this one point alone; in Philosophy, however, nothing isolated can be worked out or developed. In the various presentations of his views Schelling on each occasion began again from the beginning, because, as we may see, what went before did not satisfy him; he has ever pressed on to seek a new form, and thus he has tried various forms and terminologies in succession without ever setting forth one complete and consistent whole. His principal works in this connection are the “First Sketch of a System of Natural Philosophy,” 1799; the “System of Transcendental Idealism,” 1800, one of his most carefully thought-out works; “Bruno, a Dialogue on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things,” 1802; “Journal of Speculative Physics,” 1801; “New Journal of Speculative Physics,” 1802 et In the second number of the second volume of his “Journal of Speculative Physics,” Schelling made the commencement of a detailed treatment of the whole of his philosophy. Here he likewise starts to a certain measure, though unconsciously, from the Fichtian form of construction; but the idea is already present that nature equally with knowledge is a system of reason.

It is not feasible here to go into details respecting what is called the philosophy of Schelling, even if time permitted. For it is not yet a scientific whole organized in all its branches, since it rather consists in certain general elements which do not fluctuate with the rest of his opinions. Schelling’s philosophy must still be regarded as in process of evolution, and it has not yet ripened into fruit; we can hence give a general idea of it only.

When Schelling made his first appearance the demands put forward by Philosophy were as follows. With Descartes thought and extension were in some incomprehensible way united in God, with Spinoza it was as motionless substance; and beyond this point of view neither of them ever passed. Later on we saw the form develop, partly in the sciences and partly in the Kantian philosophy. Finally, in the Fichtian philosophy, the form was subjectivity on its own account, from which all determinations were held to develop. What is thus demanded is that this subjectivity of infinite form which we saw dying into irony or arbitrariness (pp. 507-510) should be delivered from its one-sidedness in order to be united with objectivity and substantiality. To put it otherwise, the substance of Spinoza should not be apprehended as the unmoved, but as the intelligent, as a form which possesses activity within itself of necessity, so that it is the forming power of nature, but at the same time knowledge and comprehension. This then is the object of Philosophy; it is not the formal union of Spinoza that is demanded, nor the subjective totality of Fichte, but totality with the infinite form. We see this developing in the philosophy of Schelling.

1. In one of his earlier writings, the “System of Transcendental Idealism,” which we shall consider first of all, Schelling represented transcendental philosophy and natural philosophy as the two sides of scientific knowledge. Respecting the nature of the two, he expressly declared himself in this work, where he once more adopts a Fichtian starting-point: “All knowledge rests on the harmony of an objective with a subjective.” In the common sense of the words this would be allowed; absolute unity, where the Notion and the reality are undistinguished in the perfected Idea, is the Absolute alone, or God; all else contains an element of discord between the objective and subjective. “We may give the name of nature to the entire objective content of our knowledge; the entire subjective content, on the other hand, is called the ego or intelligence.” They are in themselves identical and presupposed as identical. The relation of nature to intelligence is given by Schelling thus: “Now if all knowledge has two poles which mutually presuppose and demand one another, there must be two fundamental sciences, and it must be impossible to start from the one pole without being driven to the other.” Thus nature is impelled to spirit, and spirit to nature; either may be given the first place, and both must come to pass. “If the objective is made the chief,” we have the natural sciences as result, and “the necessary tendency,” the end, “of all natural science thus is to pass from nature to intelligence. This is the meaning of the effort to connect natural phenomena with theory. The highest perfection of natural science would be the perfect spiritualization of all natural laws into laws of intuitive perception and thought. The phenomenal (the material element) must entirely disappear, and laws (the formal element) alone remain. Hence it comes to pass that the more that which is in conformity with law breaks forth in nature itself, the more the outward covering disappears; the phenomena themselves become more spiritual, and finally cease altogether. The perfect theory of nature would be that by which the whole of nature should be resolved into an intelligence. The dead and unconscious products of nature are only abortive attempts on the part of nature to reflect itself, but the so-called dead nature is really an immature,” torpid, fossilized “intelligence”; it is implicit only, and thus remains in externality; “hence in its phenomena,” even though “still unconsciously, the character of intelligence shines through. Its highest end, which is to become object to itself, is first attained by nature” (instead of nature we should call it the Idea of nature), “through its highest and ultimate reflection, which is none other than man, or, more generally, it is that which we call reason, through which nature for the first time returns completely within itself, and whereby it becomes evident that nature is originally identical with what is known in us as intelligence or the conscious. Through this tendency to make nature intelligent natural science becomes the philosophy of nature.” The intelligent character of nature is thus spoken of as a postulate of science. The other point of view is “to give the subjective the foremost place.” Thus here “the problem is how to add an objective element agreeing with it. To start from the subjective as from the first and absolute, and to make the objective arise from it,” signifies a new departure; its consideration forms the content of true Transcendental Philosophy, or, as Schelling himself now named this science, “the other science fundamental to Philosophy.” The organ of transcendental philosophy is the subjective, the production of inward action. Production and reflection upon this production, the unconscious and conscious in one, is the æsthetic act of the imagination. Thus these two separate processes are as a whole very clearly expressed: the process which leads from nature to the subject, and that leading from the ego to the object. But the true process could only be traced out by means of logic, for it contains pure thoughts; but the logical point of view was what Schelling never arrived at in his presentation of things.

a. In respect of the ego, as principle of the transcendental philosophy, Schelling sets to work in the same way as did Fichte, inasmuch as he begins from the fact of knowledge “in which the content is conditioned through the form, and the form through the content”; this is formal A = A. But does A exist? The ego is “the point where subject and object are one in their unmediated condition”; the ego is just Ego = Ego, subject-object; and that is the act of self-consciousness wherein I am for myself object to myself. In self-consciousness there is not to be found a distinction between me and anything else; what are distinguished are directly identical, and there is so far nothing at all in opposition to this self-consciousness. How the case stands with regard to external objects is the question which must be decided later, in the further course of development. It is only the Notion of the ego which is to be laid hold of: “The Notion of the ego, that is the act whereby thought in general becomes object to itself, and the ego itself (the object) are absolutely one; independently of this act the ego is nothing.” It is the act whereby thought makes itself objective, and wherein the ego is brought into harmony with the objective, with thought; and from this standpoint it had to be demonstrated how the ego makes its way to objectivity. “The ego, as pure act, as pure action, is not objective in knowledge itself, for the reason that it is the principle of all knowledge. If it is to be object of knowledge, this must come to pass through a very different kind of knowledge than the ordinary.” The immediate consciousness of this identity is intuition, but inwardly it becomes “intellectual intuition”; it “is a knowledge which is the production of its object: sensuous intuition or perception is perception of such a nature that the perception itself appears to be different from what is perceived. Now intellectual intuition is the organ of all transcendental thought,” the act of pure self-consciousness generally. “The ego is nothing else than a process of production which ever makes itself its own object. Science can start from nothing objective,” but from “the non-objective which itself becomes object” as an “original duplicity. Idealism is the mechanism of the origination of the objective world from the inward principle of spiritual activity.”

On the one hand Schelling’s system is related to the philosophy of Fichte, and, on the other hand, he, like Jacobi, makes his principle immediate knowledge—the intelligent intuitive perception which all who wish to philosophize must have. But what comes next is that its content is no longer the indeterminate, the essence of essence, but likewise the Absolute, God, the absolutely self-existent, though expressed as concrete, i.e. as mediating itself within itself, as the absolute unity or indifference of subjective and objective. Intellectual intuition is the Fichtian imagination oscillating between two different points. We have already spoken above (p. 417) of the form of intellectual intuition; it is the most convenient manner of asserting knowledge respecting—anything one likes. But the immediate knowledge of God as spiritual is only in the consciousness of Christian nations, and not for others. This immediate knowledge appears to be still more contingent as the intellectual intuition of the concrete, or the identity of subjectivity and objectivity. This intuition is intellectual indeed, because it is a rational intuition, and as knowledge it is likewise absolutely one with the object of knowledge. But this intuition, although itself knowledge, is not as yet known; it is the unmediated, the postulated. As it is in this way an immediate we must possess it, and what may be possessed may likewise not be possessed. Thus since the immediate presupposition in Philosophy is that individuals have the immediate intuition of this identity of subjective and objective, this gave the philosophy of Schelling the appearance of indicating that the presence of this intuition in individuals demanded a special talent, genius, or condition of mind of their own, or as though it were generally speaking an accidental faculty which pertained to the specially favoured few. For the immediate, the intuitively perceived, is in the form of an existent, and is not thus an essential; and whoever does not understand the intellectual intuition must come to the conclusion that he does not possess it. Or else, in order to understand it, men must give themselves the trouble of possessing it; but no one can tell whether he has it or not—not even from understanding it, for we may merely think we understand it. Philosophy, however, is in its own nature capable of being universal; for its ground-work is thought, and it is through thought that man is man. Schelling’s principle is thus indeed clearly a universal; but if a definite intuition, a definite consciousness is demanded, such as the consciousness or intuition of the identity of subjective and objective, this determinate particular thought is not as yet to be found in it.

It was, however, in this form of knowledge of the absolute as concrete, and, further, in the form of unity of subjective and objective, that Philosophy as represented by Schelling more especially marked itself off from the ordinary conceiving consciousness and its mode of reflection. Even less than Fichte did Schelling attain to popularity (supra, pp. 504, 505), for the concrete in its nature is directly speculative. The concrete content, God, life, or whatever particular form it has, is indeed the content and object of natural consciousness; but the difficulty lies in bringing what is contained in the concrete into concrete thought in accordance with its different determinations, and in laying hold of the unity. It pertains to the standpoint of the understanding to divide and to distinguish, and to maintain the finite thought-determinations in their opposition; but Philosophy demands that these different thoughts should be brought together. Thought begins by holding apart infinite and finite, cause and effect, positive and negative; since this is the region of reflecting consciousness, the old metaphysical consciousness was able to take part in so doing: but the speculative point of view is to have this opposition before itself and to reconcile it. With Schelling the speculative form has thus again come to the front, and philosophy has again obtained a special character of its own; the principle of Philosophy, rational thought in itself, has obtained the form of thought. In the philosophy of Schelling the content, the truth, has once more become the matter of chief importance, whereas in the Kantian philosophy the point of interest was more especially stated to be the necessity for investigating subjective knowledge. This is the standpoint of Schelling’s philosophy in its general aspects.

b. Since in further analysis the distinction between subject and object comes into view and is accepted, there follows the relationship of the ego to its other; with Fichte that forms the second proposition, in which the self-limitation of the ego is posited. The ego posits itself in opposition to itself, since it posits itself as conditioned by the non-ego; that is the infinite repulsion, for this conditionment is the ego itself. Schelling, on the one hand, says: “The ego is unlimited as the ego only in so far as it is limited,” as it relates to the non-ego. Only thus does consciousness exist, self-consciousness is a barren determination; through its intuition of self the ego becomes finite to itself. “This contradiction only allows itself to be dissolved by the ego becoming in this finitude infinite to itself, i.e. by its having an intuitive perception of itself as an infinite Becoming.” The relation of the ego to itself and to the infinite check or force of repulsion is a constant one. On the other hand it is said: “The ego is limited only in so far as it is unlimited;” this limitation is thus necessary in order to be able to get beyond it. The contradiction which we find here remains even if the ego always limits the non-ego. “Both activities—that which makes for infinitude, the limitable, real, objective activity, and the limiting and ideal, mutually presuppose one another. Idealism reflects merely on the one, realism on the other, transcendental idealism on both.” All this is a tangled mass of abstractions.

c. “Neither through the limiting activity nor through the limited does the ego arrive at self-consciousness. There consequently is a third activity, compounded from the other two, through which the ego of self-consciousness arises; this third is that which oscillates between the two—the struggle between opposing tendencies.” There is essential relation only, relative identity; the difference therein present thus ever remains. “This struggle cannot be reconciled by one such action, but only by an infinite succession of such,” i.e. the reconciliation of the opposition between the two tendencies of the ego, the inward and the outward, is, in the infinite course of progression, only an apparent one. In order that it may be complete, the whole inward and outward nature must be presented in all its details: but Philosophy can only set forth the epochs which are most important. “If all the intermediate links in sensation could be set forth, that would necessarily lead us to a deduction of all the qualities in nature, which last is impossible.” Now this third activity, which contains the union directly in itself, is a thought in which particularity is already contained. It is the intuitive understanding of Kant, the intelligent intuition or intuitively perceiving intelligence; Schelling, indeed, definitely names this absolute unity of contradictions intellectual intuition. The ego here is not one-sided in regard to what is different; it is identity of the unconscious and the conscious, but not an identity of such a nature that its ground rests on the ego itself.

This ego must be the absolute principle: “All philosophy starts from a principle which as absolute identity is non-objective.” For if it is objective, separation is at once posited and it is confronted by another; but the principle is the reconciliation of the opposition, and therefore in and for itself it is non-objective. “Now how should a principle such as this be called forth to consciousness and understood, as is required if it is the condition attached to the comprehension of all philosophy? That it can no more be comprehended through Notions [Begriffe] than set forth, requires no proof.” Notion to Schelling signifies a category of the ordinary understanding; Notion is, however, the concrete thought which in itself is infinite. “There thus remains nothing more than that it should be set forth in an immediate intuition. If there were such an intuition which had as object the absolutely identical, that which in itself is neither subjective nor objective, and if for such, which,” however, “can be an intellectual intuition only, one could appeal to immediate experience,” the question would be: “How can this intuition be again made objective, i.e. how can it be asserted without doubt that it does not rest on a subjective deception, if there is not a universal objectivity in that intuition, which is recognized by all?” This intellectual principle in itself should thus be given in an experience so that men may be able to appeal to it. “The objectivity of intellectual intuition is art. The work of art alone reflects to me what is otherwise reflected through nothing—that absolute identical which has already separated itself in the ego itself.” The objectivity of identity and the knowledge of the same is art; in one and the same intuition the ego is here conscious of itself and unconscious. This intellectual intuition which has become objective is objective sensuous intuition—but the Notion, the comprehended necessity, is a very different objectivity.

Thus a principle is presupposed both for the content of philosophy and for subjective philosophizing: on the one hand it is demanded that the attitude adopted should be one of intellectual intuition, and, on the other hand, this principle has to be authenticated, and this takes place in the work of art. This is the highest form of the objectivization of reason, because in it sensuous conception is united with intellectuality, sensuous existence is merely the expression of spirituality. The highest objectivity which the subject attains, the highest identity of subjective and objective, is that which Schelling terms the power of imagination. Art is thus comprehended as what is inmost and highest, that which produces the intellectual and real in one, and philosophizing is conceived as this genius of art. But art and power of imagination are not supreme. For the Idea, spirit, cannot be truly given expression to in the manner in which art expresses its Idea. This last is always a method pertaining to intuitive perception; and on account of this sensuous form of existence the work of art cannot correspond to the spirit. Thus because the point last arrived at is designated as the faculty of imagination, as art, even in the subject this is a subordinate point of view, and thus in itself this point is not the absolute identity of subjectivity and objectivity. In subjective thought, rational, speculative thought is thus indeed demanded, but if this appears false to you nothing farther can be said than that you do not possess intellectual intuition. The proving of anything, the making it comprehensible, is thus abandoned; a correct apprehension of it is directly demanded, and the Idea is thus assertorically pre-established as principle. The Absolute is the absolute identity of subjective and objective, the absolute indifference of real and ideal, of form and essence, of universal and particular; in this identity of the two there is neither the one nor the other. But the unity is not abstract, empty, and dry; that would signify logical identity, classification according to something common to both, in which the difference remains all the while outside. The identity is concrete: it is subjectivity as well as objectivity; the two are present therein as abrogated and ideal. This identity may easily be shown in the ordinary conception: the conception, we may for example say, is subjective; it has, too, the determinate content of exclusion in reference to other conceptions; nevertheless, the conception is simple—it is one act, one unity.

What is lacking in Schelling’s philosophy is thus the fact that the point of indifference of subjectivity and objectivity, or the Notion of reason, is absolutely presupposed, without any attempt being made at showing that this is the truth. Schelling often uses Spinoza’s form of procedure, and sets up axioms. In philosophy, when we desire to establish a position, we demand proof. But if we begin with intellectual intuition, that constitutes an oracle to which we have to give way, since the existence of intellectual intuition was made our postulate. The true proof that this identity of subjective and objective is the truth, could only be brought about by means of each of the two being investigated in its logical, i.e. essential determinations; and in regard to them, it must then be shown that the subjective signifies the transformation of itself into the objective, and that the objective signifies its not remaining such, but making itself subjective. Similarly in the finite, it would have to be shown that it contained a contradiction in itself, and made itself infinite; in this way we should have the unity of finite and infinite. In so doing, this unity of opposites is not asserted beforehand, but in the opposites themselves it is shown that their truth is their unity, but that each taken by itself is one-sided—that their difference veers round, casting itself headlong into this unity—while the understanding all the time thinks that in these differences it possesses something fixed and secure. The result of thinking contemplation would in this former case be that each moment would secretly make itself into its opposite, the identity of both being alone the truth. The understanding certainly calls this transformation sophistry, humbug, juggling, and what-not. As a result, this identity would, according to Jacobi, be one which was no doubt conditioned and of set purpose produced. But we must remark that a one-sided point of view is involved in apprehending the result of development merely as a result; it is a process which is likewise mediation within itself, of such a nature that this mediation is again abrogated and asserted as immediate. Schelling, indeed, had this conception in a general way, but he did not follow it out in a definite logical method, for with him it remained an immediate truth, which can only be verified by means of intellectual intuition. That is the great difficulty in the philosophy of Schelling. And then it was misunderstood and all interest taken from it. It is easy enough to show that subjective and objective are different. Were they not different, nothing could be made of them any more than of A = A; but they are in opposition as one. In all that is finite, an identity is present, and this alone is actual; but besides the fact that the finite is this identity, it is also true that it is the absence of harmony between subjectivity and objectivity, Notion and reality; and it is in this that finitude consists. To this principle of Schelling’s, form, or necessity, is thus lacking, it is only asserted. Schelling appears to have this in common with Plato and the Neo-Platonists, that knowledge is to be found in the inward intuition of eternal Ideas wherein knowledge is unmediated in the Absolute. But when Plato speaks of this intuition of the soul, which has freed itself from all knowledge that is finite, empirical, or reflected, and the Neo-Platonists tell of the ecstasy of thought in which knowledge is the immediate knowledge of the Absolute, this definite distinction must be noticed, viz., that with Plato’s knowledge of the universal, or with his intellectuality, wherein all opposition as a reality is abrogated, dialectic is associated, or the recognized necessity for the abrogation of these opposites; Plato does not begin with this, for with him the movement in which they abrogate themselves is present. The Absolute is itself to be looked at as this movement of self-abrogation; this is the only actual knowledge and knowledge of the Absolute. With Schelling this idea has, however, no dialectic present in it whereby those opposites may determine themselves to pass over into their unity, and in so doing to be comprehended.

2. Schelling begins with the idea of the Absolute as identity of the subjective and objective, and accordingly there evinced itself in the presentations of his system which followed, the further necessity of proving this idea; this he attempted to do in the two Journals of Speculative Physics. But if that method be once adopted, the procedure is not immanent development from the speculative Idea, but it follows the mode of external reflection. Schelling’s proofs are adduced in such an exceedingly formal manner that they really invariably presuppose the very thing that was to be proved. The axiom assumes the main point in question, and all the rest follows as a matter of course. Here is an instance: “The innermost essence of the Absolute can only be thought of as identity absolute, altogether pure and undisturbed. For the Absolute is only absolute, and what is thought in it is necessarily and invariably the same, or in other words, is necessarily and invariably absolute. If the idea of the Absolute were a general Notion” (or conception), “this would not prevent a difference being met with in it, notwithstanding this unity of the absolute. For things the most different are yet in the Notion always one and identical, just as a rectangle, a polygon and a circle are all figures. The possibility of the difference of all things in association with perfect unity in the Notion lies in the manner in which the particular in them is combined with the universal. In the Absolute this altogether disappears, because it pertains to the very idea of the Absolute that the particular in it is also the universal, and the universal the particular; and further that by means of this unity form and existence are also one in it. Consequently, in regard to the Absolute, from the fact of its being the Absolute, there likewise follows the absolute exclusion from its existence of all difference, and that at once.”

In the former of the two above-named works, the “Journal of Speculative Physics,” Schelling began by again bringing forward the Substance of Spinoza, simple, absolute Existence, inasmuch as he makes his starting-point the absolute identity of the subjective and objective. Here, like Spinoza, he employed the method of geometry, laying down axioms and proving by means of propositions, then going on to deduce other propositions from these, and so on. But this method has no real application to philosophy. Schelling at this point laid down certain forms of difference, to which he gave the name of potencies, adopting the term from Eschenmayer, who made use of it (p. 514); they are ready-made differences, which Schelling avails himself of. But philosophy must not take any forms from other sciences, as here from mathematics. With Schelling, the leading form is that which was brought into remembrance again by Kant, the form of triplicity as first, second, and third potency.

Schelling, like Fichte, begins with I = I, or with the absolute intuition, expressed as proposition or definition of the Absolute, that “Reason is the absolute indifference of subject and object”: so that it is neither the one nor the other, for both have in it their true determination; and their opposition, like all others, is utterly done away with. The true reality of subject and object is placed in this alone, that the subject is not posited in the determination of subject against object, as in the philosophy of Fichte; it is not determined as in itself existent, but as subject-object, as the identity of the two; in the same way the object is not posited according to its ideal determination as object, but in as far as it is itself absolute, or the identity of the subjective and objective. But the expression “indifference” is ambiguous, for it means indifference in regard to both the one and the other; and thus it appears as if the content of indifference, the only thing which makes it concrete, were indifferent. Schelling’s next requirement is that the subject must not be hampered with reflection; that would be bringing it under the determination of the understanding, which, equally with sensuous perception, implies the separateness of sensuous things. As to the form of its existence, absolute indifference is with Schelling posited as A = A; and this form is for him the knowledge of absolute identity, which, however, is inseparable from the Being or existence of the same.

Thus, therefore, opposition, as form and reality or existence, no doubt appears in this Absolute, but it is determined as a merely relative or unessential opposition: “Between subject and object no other than quantitative difference is possible. For no qualitative difference as regards the two is thinkable,” because absolute identity “is posited as subject and object only as regards the form of its Being, not as regards its existence. There is consequently only a quantitative difference left,” i.e. only that of magnitude: and yet difference must really be understood as qualitative, and must thus be shown to be a difference which abrogates itself. This quantitative difference, says Schelling, is the form actu: “The quantitative difference of subjective and objective is the basis of all finitude. Each determined potency marks a determined quantitative difference of the subjective and objective. Each individual Being is the result of a quantitative difference of subjectivity and objectivity. The individual expresses absolute identity under a determined form of Being:” so that each side is itself a relative totality, A = B, and at the same time the one factor preponderates in the one, and the other factor in the other, but both remain absolute identity. This is insufficient, for there are other determinations; difference is undoubtedly qualitative, although this is not the absolute determination. Quantitative difference is no true difference, but an entirely external relation; and likewise the preponderance of subjective and objective is not a determination of thought, but a merely sensuous determination.

The Absolute itself, in so far as the positing of difference is taken into account, is defined by Schelling as the quantitative indifference of subjective and objective: in respect to absolute identity no quantitative difference is thinkable. “Quantitative difference is only possible outside of absolute identity, and outside of absolute totality. There is nothing in itself outside of totality, excepting by virtue of an arbitrary separation of the individual from the whole. Absolute identity exists only under the form of the quantitative indifference of subjective and objective.” Quantitative difference, which appears outside of absolute identity and totality, is therefore, according to Schelling, in itself absolute identity, and consequently thinkable only under the form of the quantitative indifference of the subjective and objective. “This opposition does not therefore occur in itself, or from the standpoint of speculation. From this standpoint A exists just as much as B does; for A like B is the whole absolute identity, which only exists under the two forms, but under both of them alike. Absolute identity is the universe itself. The form of its Being can be thought of under the image of a line,” as shown by the following scheme:

+ + A = B A = B ----------------- A = A

“in which the same identity is posited in each direction, but with A or B preponderating in opposite directions.” If we go into details, the main points from an elementary point of view are the following.

The first potency is that the first quantitative difference of the Absolute, or “the first relative totality is matter. Proof: A = B is not anything real either as relative identity or as relative duplicity. As identity A = B, in the individual as in the whole, can be expressed only by the line,”—the first dimension. “But in that line A is posited throughout as existent,” i.e. it is at the same time related to B. “Therefore this line presupposes A = B as relative totality throughout; relative totality is therefore the first presupposition, and if relative identity exists, it exists only through relative totality,”—this is duplicity, the second dimension. “In the same way relative duplicity presupposes relative identity. Relative identity and duplicity are contained in relative totality, not indeed actu, but yet potentia. Therefore the two opposites must mutually extinguish each other in a third” dimension. “Absolute identity as the immediate basis of the reality of A and B in matter, is the force of gravitation. If A preponderates we have the force of attraction, if B preponderates we have that of expansion. The quantitative positing of the forces of attraction and expansion passes into the infinite; their equilibrium exists in the whole, not in the individual.” From matter as the first indifference in immediacy Schelling now passes on to further determinations.

The second potency (A²) is light, this identity itself posited as existent; in so far as A = B, A² is also posited. The same identity, “posited under the form of relative identity,” i.e. of the polarity which we find appearing “in A and B, is the force of cohesion. Cohesion is the impression made on matter by the self-hood” of light “or by personality, whereby matter first emerges as particular out of the universal identity, and raises itself into the realm of form.” Planets, metals and other bodies form a series which under the form of dynamic cohesion expresses particular relations of cohesion, in which on the one hand contraction preponderates, and on the other hand expansion. These potencies appear with Schelling as north and south, east and west polarity: their developments further appear as north-west, south-east, &c. He counts as the last potency Mercury, Venus, the Earth, &c. He continues: “Cohesion outside of the point of indifference I term passive. Towards the negative side” (or pole) “fall some of the metals which stand next to iron, after them the so-called precious metals,” then the “diamond, and lastly carbon, the greatest passive cohesion. Towards the positive side, again, some metals fall, in which the cohesive nature of iron gradually diminishes,” i.e. approaches disintegration, and lastly “disappears in nitrogen.” Active cohesion is magnetism, and the material universe is an infinite magnet. The magnetic process is difference in indifference, and indifference in difference, and therefore absolute identity as such. The indifference point of the magnet is the “neither nor” and the “as well as”; the poles are potentially the same essence, only posited under two factors which are opposed. Both poles depend “only upon whether + or - preponderates”; they are not pure abstractions. “In the total magnet the empirical magnet is the indifference point. The empirical magnet is iron. All bodies are mere metamorphoses of iron—they are potentially contained in iron. Every two different bodies which touch each other set up mutually in each other relative diminution and increase of cohesion. This mutual alteration of cohesion by means of the contact of two different bodies is electricity; the cohesion-diminishing factor +E is the potency of hydrogen,-E is the potency of oxygen. The totality of the dynamic process is represented only by the chemical process.”

“By the positing of the dynamic totality the addition of light is directly posited as a product. The expression, the total product, therefore signifies light combined with the force of gravitation; by the positing of the relative totality of the whole potency, the force of gravity is directly reduced to the mere form of the Being of absolute identity.” Thus is the third potency (A³), the organism. Schelling launched out into too many individual details, if he desired to indicate the construction of the whole universe. On the one hand, however, he did not complete this representation, and on the other hand, he has confined himself mainly to implicit existence, and has mixed therewith the formalism of external construction according to a presupposed scheme. In this representation he advanced only as far as the organism, and did not reach the presentation of the other side of knowledge, i.e. the philosophy of spirit. Schelling began time after time, in accordance with the idea implied in this construction, to work out the natural universe, and especially the organism. He banishes all such meaningless terms as perfection, wisdom, outward adaptability; or, in other words, the Kantian formula, that a thing appears so and so to our faculty of knowledge, is transformed by him into this other formula, that such and such is the constitution of Nature. Following up Kant’s meagre attempt at demonstrating spirit in nature, he devoted special attention to inaugurating anew this mode of regarding nature, so as to recognize in objective existence the same schematism, the same rhythm, as is present in the ideal. Hence nature represents itself therein not as something alien to spirit, but as being in its general aspect a projection of spirit into an objective mode.

We have further to remark that Schelling by this theory became the originator of modern Natural Philosophy, since he was the first to exhibit Nature as the sensuous perception or the expression of the Notion and its determinations. Natural Philosophy is no new science; we met with it continually—in the works of Aristotle, for instance, and elsewhere. English Philosophy is also a mere apprehension in thought of the physical; forces, laws of Nature, are its fundamental determinations. The opposition of physics and Natural Philosophy is therefore not the opposition of the unthinking and the thinking view of Nature; Natural Philosophy means, if we take it in its whole extent, nothing else than the thoughtful contemplation of Nature; but this is the work of ordinary physics also, since its determinations of forces, laws, &c., are thoughts. The only difference is that in physics thoughts are formal thoughts of the understanding, whose material and content cannot, as regards their details, be determined by thought itself, but must be taken from experience. But concrete thought contains its determination and its content in itself, and merely the external mode of appearance pertains to the senses. If, then, Philosophy passes beyond the form of the understanding, and has apprehended the speculative Notion, it must alter the determinations of thought, the categories of the understanding regarding Nature. Kant was the first to set about this; and Schelling has sought to grasp the Notion of Nature, instead of contenting himself with the ordinary metaphysics of the same. Nature is to him nothing but the external mode of existence as regards the system of thought-forms, just as mind is the existence of the same system in the form of consciousness. That for which we have to thank Schelling, therefore, is not that he brought thought to bear on the comprehension of Nature, but that he altered the categories according to which thought applied itself to Nature; he introduced forms of Reason, and applied them—as he did the form of the syllogism in magnetism, for instance—in place of the ordinary categories of the understanding. He has not only shown these forms in Nature, but has also sought to evolve Nature out of a principle of this kind.

In the “Further Exposition of the System of Philosophy” which the “New Journal for Speculative Physics” furnishes, Schelling chose other forms; for, by reason of incompletely developed form and lack of dialectic, he had recourse to various forms one after another, because he found none of them sufficient. Instead of the equilibrium of subjectivity and objectivity, he now speaks of the identity of existence and form, of universal and particular, of finite and infinite, of positive and negative, and he defines absolute indifference sometimes in one and sometimes in another form of opposition, just according to chance. All such oppositions may be employed; but they are only abstract, and refer to different stages in the development of the logical principle itself. Form and essence are distinguished by Schelling in this way, that form, regarded on its own account, is the particular, or the emerging of difference, subjectivity. But real existence is absolute form or absolute knowledge immediately in itself, a self-conscious existence in the sense of thinking knowledge, just as with Spinoza it had the form of something objective or in thought. Speculative Philosophy is to be found in this assertion, not that it asserts an independent philosophy, for it is purely organization; knowledge is based on the Absolute. Thus Schelling has again given to transcendental Idealism the significance of absolute Idealism. This unity of existence and form is thus, according to Schelling, the Absolute; or if we regard reality as the universal, and form as the particular, the Absolute is the absolute unity of universal and particular, or of Being and knowledge. The different aspects, subject and object, or universal and particular, are only ideal oppositions; they are in the Absolute entirely and altogether one. This unity as form is intellectual intuition, which posits Thinking and Being as absolutely alike, and as it formally expresses the Absolute, it becomes at the same time the expression of its essence. He who has not the power of imagination, whereby he may represent this unity to himself, is deficient in the organ of Philosophy. But in this consists the true absoluteness of all and each, that the one is not recognized as universal, and the other as particular, but the universal in this its determination is recognized as unity of the universal and particular, and in like manner the particular is recognized as the unity of both. Construction merely consists in leading back everything determined and particular into the Absolute, or regarding it as it is in absolute unity; its determinateness is only its ideal moment, but its truth is really its Being in the Absolute. These three moments or potencies—that of the passing of existence (the infinite) into form (the finite), and of form into existence (which are both relative unities), and the third, the absolute unity, thus recur anew in each individual. Hence Nature, the real or actual aspect, as the passing of existence into form or of the universal into the particular, itself again possesses these three unities in itself, and in the same way the ideal aspect does so; therefore each potency is on its own account once more absolute. This is the general idea of the scientific construction of the universe—to repeat in each individual alike the triplicity which is the scheme of the whole, thereby to show the identity of all things, and in doing so to regard them in their absolute essence, so that they all express the same unity.

The more detailed explanation is extremely formal: “Existence passes into form—this taken by itself being the particular (the finite)—by means of the infinite being added to it; unity is received into multiplicity, indifference into difference.” The other assertion is: “Form passes into existence by the finite being received into the infinite, difference into indifference.” But passing into and receiving into are merely sensuous expressions. “Otherwise expressed, the particular becomes absolute form by the universal becoming one with it, and the universal becomes absolute existence by the particular becoming one with it. But these two unities, as in the Absolute, are not outside of one another, but in one another, and therefore the Absolute is absolute indifference of form and existence,” as unity of this double passing-into-one. “By means of these two unities two different potencies are determined, but in themselves they are both the exactly equal roots of the Absolute.” That is a mere assertion, the continual return after each differentiation, which is perpetually again removed out of the Absolute.

“Of the first absolute transformation there are copies in phenomenal Nature; therefore Nature, regarded in itself, is nothing else than that first transformation as it exists in the absolute (unseparated from the other). For by means of the infinite passing into the finite, existence passes into form; since then form obtains reality only by means of existence, existence, when it has passed into form without form having (according to the assumption) similarly passed into existence, can be represented only as potentiality or ground of reality, but not as indifference of possibility and actuality. But that which may be described thus, namely as existence, in so far as that is mere ground of reality, and therefore has really passed into form, although form has not in turn passed into it, is what presents itself as Nature.—Existence makes its appearance in form, but in return form also makes its appearance in existence; this is the other unity,” that of mind. “This unity is established by the finite being received into the infinite. At this point form, as the particular, strikes into existence, and itself becomes absolute. Form which passes into existence places itself as absolute activity and positive cause of reality in opposition to the existence which passes into form, and which appears only as ground. The passing of absolute form into existence is what we think of as God, and the images or copies of this transformation are in the ideal world, which is therefore in its implicitude the other unity.” Each of these two transformations, then, is the whole totality, not, however, posited and not appearing as totality, but with the one or the other factor preponderating; each of the two spheres has, therefore, in itself again these differences, and thus in each of them the three potencies are to be found.

The ground or basis, Nature as basis merely, is matter, gravity, as the first potency; this passing of form into existence is in the actual world universal mechanism, necessity. But the second potency is “the light which shineth in darkness, form which has passed into existence. The absolute unification of the two unities in actuality, so that matter is altogether form, and form is altogether matter, is organism, the highest expression of Nature as it is in God, and of God as He is in Nature, in the finite.” On the ideal side “Knowledge is the essence of the Absolute brought into the daylight of form; action is a transformation of form, as the particular, into the essence of the Absolute. As in the real world form that is identified with essence appears as light, so in the ideal world God Himself appears in particular manifestation as the living form which has emerged in the passing of form into essence, so that in every respect the ideal and real world are again related as likeness and symbol. The absolute unification of the two unities in the ideal, so that material is wholly form and form wholly material, is the work of art; and that secret hidden in the Absolute which is the root of all reality comes here into view, in the reflected world itself, in the highest potency and highest union of God and Nature as the power of imagination.” On account of that permeation art and poetry therefore hold the highest rank in Schelling’s estimation. But art is the Absolute in sensuous form alone. Where and what could the work of art be, which should correspond to the Idea of the spirit? “The universe is formed in the Absolute as the most perfect organic existence and the most perfect work of art: for Reason, which recognizes the Absolute in it, it possesses absolute truth; for the imagination, which represents the Absolute in it, it possesses absolute Beauty. Each of these expresses the very same unity,” regarded “from different sides; and both arrive at the absolute indifference point in the recognition of which lies both the beginning and the aim of real knowledge.” This highest Idea, these differences, are grasped as a whole in a very formal manner only.

3. The relation of Nature to Spirit, and to God, the Absolute, has been stated by Schelling elsewhere, i.e. in his later expositions, as follows: he defines the existence of God as Nature—in so far as God constitutes Himself its ground or basis, as infinite perception—and Nature is thus the negative moment in God, since intelligence and thought exist only by means of the opposition of one Being. For in one of his writings, directed on some particular occasion against Jacobi, Schelling explains himself further with regard to the nature of God and His relation to Nature. He says: “God, or more properly the existence which is God, is ground: He is ground of Himself as a moral Being. But” then “it is ground that He makes Himself”—not cause. Something must precede intelligence, and that something is Being—“since thought is the exact opposite of Being. That which is the beginning of an intelligence cannot be in its turn intelligent, since there would otherwise be no distinction; but it cannot be absolutely unintelligent, for the very reason that it is the potentiality of an intelligence. It will accordingly be something between these, i.e. it will operate with wisdom, but as it were with an innate, instinctive, blind, and yet unconscious wisdom; just as we often hear those who are under a spell uttering words full of understanding, but not uttering them with comprehension of their meaning, but as it were owing to an inspiration.” God, therefore, as this ground of Himself, is Nature—Nature as it is in God; this is the view taken of Nature in Natural Philosophy. But the work of the Absolute is to abrogate this ground, and to constitute itself Intelligence. On this account Schelling’s philosophy has later been termed a Philosophy of Nature, and that in the sense of a universal philosophy, while at first Natural Philosophy was held to be only a part of the whole.

It is not incumbent on us here to give a more detailed account of Schelling’s philosophy, or to show points in the expositions hitherto given by him which are far from satisfactory. The system is the latest form of Philosophy which we had to consider, and it is a form both interesting and true. In the first place special emphasis, in dealing with Schelling, must be laid on the idea that he has grasped the true as the concrete, as the unity of subjective and objective. The main point in Schelling’s philosophy thus is that its interest centres round that deep, speculative content, which, as content, is the content with which Philosophy in the entire course of its history has had to do. The Thought which is free and independent, not abstract, but in itself concrete, comprehends itself in itself as an intellectually actual world; and this is the truth of Nature, Nature in itself. The second great merit possessed by Schelling is to have pointed out in Nature the forms of Spirit; thus electricity, magnetism, &c., are for him only external modes of the Idea. His defect is that this Idea in general, its distinction into the ideal and the natural world, and also the totality of these determinations, are not shown forth and developed as necessitated in themselves by the Notion. As Schelling has not risen to this point of view, he has misconceived the nature of thought; the work of art thus becomes for him the supreme and only mode in which the Idea exists for spirit. But the supreme mode of the Idea is really its own element; thought, the Idea apprehended, is therefore higher than the work of art. The Idea is the truth, and all that is true is the Idea; the systematizing of the Idea into the world must be proved to be a necessary unveiling and revelation. With Schelling, on the other hand, form is really an external scheme, and his method is the artificial application of this scheme to external objects. This externally applied scheme takes the place of dialectic progress; and this is the special reason why the philosophy of Nature has brought itself into discredit, that it has proceeded on an altogether external plan, has made its foundation a ready-made scheme, and fitted into it Nature as we perceive it. These forms were potencies with Schelling, but instead of mathematical forms or a type of thought like this, by some other men sensuous forms have been taken as basis, just as were sulphur and mercury by Jacob Boehme. For instance, magnetism, electricity, and chemistry have been defined to be the three potencies in Nature, and thus in the organism reproduction has been termed chemistry; irritability, electricity; and sensibility, magnetism. In this way there has crept into Natural Philosophy the great formalism of representing everything as a series, which is a superficial determination without necessity, since instead of Notions we find formulas. Brilliant powers of imagination are displayed, such as were exhibited by Görres. This mistake of applying forms which are taken from one sphere of Nature to another sphere of the same has been carried a long way; Oken, for example, calls wood-fibres the nerves and brain of the plant, and is almost crazy on the subject. Philosophy would in this way become a play of mere analogical reflections; and it is not with these but with thoughts that we have to do. Nerves are not thoughts, any more than such expressions as pole of contraction, of expansion, masculine, feminine, &c. The formal plan of applying an external scheme to the sphere of Nature which one wishes to observe, is the external work of Natural Philosophy, and this scheme is itself derived from the imagination. That is a most false mode of proceeding; Schelling took advantage of it to some extent, others have made a complete misuse of it. All this is done to escape thought; nevertheless, thought is the ultimate simple determination which has to be dealt with.

It is therefore of the greatest importance to distinguish Schelling’s philosophy, on the one hand, from that imitation of it which throws itself into an unspiritual farrago of words regarding the Absolute; and, on the other hand, from the philosophy of those imitators, who, owing to a failure to understand intellectual intuition, give up comprehension, and with it the leading moment of knowledge, and speak from so-called intuition, i.e. they take a glance at the thing in question, and having fastened on it some superficial analogy or definition, they fancy they have expressed its whole nature, while in point of fact they put an end to all capacity for attaining to scientific knowledge. This whole tendency places itself, in the first place, in opposition to reflective thought, or to progress in fixed, steadfast, immovable Notions. But instead of remaining in the Notion and recognizing it as the unresting ego, they have lighted on the opposite extreme of passive intuition, of immediate Being, of fixed implicitude; and they think that they can make up for the lack of fixity by superficial observation, and can render this observation intellectual by determining it once more by some fixed Notion or other; or they bring their minds to bear on the object of consideration by saying, for instance, that the ostrich is the fish among birds, because he has a long neck—fish becomes a general term, but not a Notion. This whole mode of reasoning, which has forced its way into natural history and natural science, as well as into medicine, is a miserable formalism, an irrational medley of the crudest empiricism with the most superficial ideal determinations that formalism ever descended to. The philosophy of Locke is not so crude as it is, for it is not a whit better in either its content or its form, and it is combined with foolish self-conceit into the bargain. Philosophy on this account sank into general and well-deserved contempt, such as is for the most part extended to those who assert that they have a monopoly of philosophy. Instead of earnestness of apprehension and circumspection of thought, we find in them a juggling with idle fancies, which pass for deep conceptions, lofty surmises, and even for poetry; and they think they are right in the centre of things when they are only on the surface. Five-and-twenty years ago the case was the same with poetic art; a taste for ingenious conceits took possession of it, and the effusions of its poetic inspiration came forth blindly from itself, shot out as from a pistol. The results were either crazy ravings, or, if they were not ravings, they were prose so dull that it was unworthy of the name of prose. It is just the same in the later philosophies. What is not utterly senseless drivel about the indifference-point and polarity, about oxygen, the holy, the infinite, &c., is made up of thoughts so trivial that we might well doubt our having correctly apprehended their meaning, in the first place because they are given forth with such arrogant effrontery, and in the second place because we cannot help trusting that what was said was not so trivial as it seems. As in the Philosophy of Nature men forgot the Notion and proceeded in a dead unspiritual course, so here they lose sight of spirit entirely. They have strayed from the right road; for by their principle, Notion and perception are one unity, but in point of fact this unity, this spirit, itself emerges in immediacy, and is therefore in intuitive perception, and not in the Notion.

E. FINAL RESULT.

The present standpoint of philosophy is that the Idea is known in its necessity; the sides of its diremption, Nature and Spirit, are each of them recognized as representing the totality of the Idea, and not only as being in themselves identical, but as producing this one identity from themselves; and in this way the identity is recognized as necessary. Nature, and the world or history of spirit, are the two realities; what exists as actual Nature is an image of divine Reason; the forms of self-conscious Reason are also the forms of Nature. The ultimate aim and business of philosophy is to reconcile thought or the Notion with reality. It is easy from subordinate standpoints to find satisfaction in modes of intuitive perception and of feeling. But the deeper the spirit goes within itself, the more vehement is the opposition, the more abundant is the wealth without; the depth is to be measured by the greatness of the craving with which spirit seeks to find itself in what lies outside of itself. We saw the thought which apprehends itself appearing; it strove to make itself concrete within itself. Its first activity is formal; Aristotle was the first to say that νοῦς is the thought of thought. The result is the thought which is at home with itself, and at the same time embraces the universe therein, and transforms it into an intelligent world. In apprehension the spiritual and the natural universe are interpenetrated as one harmonious universe, which withdraws into itself, and in its various aspects develops the Absolute into a totality, in order, by the very process of so doing, to become conscious of itself in its unity, in Thought. Philosophy is thus the true theodicy, as contrasted with art and religion and the feelings which these call up—a reconciliation of spirit, namely of the spirit which has apprehended itself in its freedom and in the riches of its reality.

To this point the World-spirit has come, and each stage has its own form in the true system of Philosophy; nothing is lost, all principles are preserved, since Philosophy in its final aspect is the totality of forms. This concrete idea is the result of the strivings of spirit during almost twenty-five centuries of earnest work to become objective to itself, to know itself:

Tantæ molis erat, se ipsam cognoscere mentem.

All this time was required to produce the philosophy of our day; so tardily and slowly did the World-spirit work to reach this goal. What we pass in rapid review when we recall it, stretched itself out in reality to this great length of time. For in this lengthened period, the Notion of Spirit, invested with its entire concrete development, its external subsistence, its wealth, is striving to bring spirit to perfection, to make progress itself and to develop from spirit. It goes ever on and on, because spirit is progress alone. Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! canst work i’ the ground so fast?”), until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away. At such a time, when the encircling crust, like a soulless decaying tenement, crumbles away, and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth, the seven league boots are at length adopted. This work of the spirit to know itself, this activity to find itself, is the life of the spirit and the spirit itself. Its result is the Notion which it takes up of itself; the history of Philosophy is a revelation of what has been the aim of spirit throughout its history; it is therefore the world’s history in its innermost signification. This work of the human spirit in the recesses of thought is parallel with all the stages of reality; and therefore no philosophy oversteps its own time. The importance which the determinations of thought possessed is another matter, which does not belong to the history of Philosophy. These Notions are the simplest revelation of the World spirit: in their more concrete form they are history.

We must, therefore, in the first place not esteem lightly what spirit has won, namely its gains up to the present day. Ancient Philosophy is to be reverenced as necessary, and as a link in this sacred chain, but all the same nothing more than a link. The present is the highest stage reached. In the second place, all the various philosophies are no mere fashionable theories of the time, or anything of a similar nature; they are neither chance products nor the blaze of a fire of straw, nor casual eruptions here and there, but a spiritual, reasonable, forward advance; they are of necessity one Philosophy in its development, the revelation of God, as He knows Himself to be. Where several philosophies appear at the same time, they are different sides which make up one totality forming their basis; and on account of their one-sidedness we see the refutation of the one by the other. In the third place we do not find here feeble little efforts to establish or to criticize this or that particular point; instead of that, each philosophy sets up a new principle of its own, and this must be recognized.

If we glance at the main epochs in the whole history of Philosophy, and grasp the necessary succession of stages in the leading moments, each of which expresses a determinate Idea, we find that after the Oriental whirl of subjectivity, which attains to no intelligibility and therefore to no subsistence, the light of thought dawned among the Greeks.

1. The philosophy of the ancients had the absolute Idea as its thought; and the realization or reality of the same consisted in comprehending the existing present world, and regarding it as it is in its absolute nature. This philosophy did not make its starting-point the Idea itself, but proceeded from the objective as from something given, and transformed the same into the Idea; the Being of Parmenides.

2. Abstract thought, νοῦς, became known to itself as universal essence or existence, not as subjective thought; the Universal of Plato.

3. In Aristotle the Notion emerges, free and unconstrained, as comprehending thought, permeating and spiritualizing all the forms which the universe contains.

4. The Notion as subject, its independence, its inwardness, abstract separation, is represented by the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: here we have not the free, concrete form, but universality abstract and in itself formal.

5. The thought of totality, the intelligible world, is the concrete Idea as we have seen it with the Neo-Platonists. This principle is ideality generally speaking, which is present in all reality, but not the Idea which knows itself: this is not reached until the principle of subjectivity, individuality, found a place in it, and God as spirit became actual to Himself in self-consciousness.

6. But it has been the work of modern times to grasp this Idea as spirit, as the Idea that knows itself. In order to proceed from the conscious Idea to the self-conscious, we must have the infinite opposition, namely the fact that the Idea has come to the consciousness of being absolutely sundered in twain. As spirit had the thought of objective existence, Philosophy thus perfected the intellectuality of the world, and produced this spiritual world as an object existing beyond present reality, like Nature,—the first creation of spirit. The work of the spirit now consisted in bringing this Beyond back to reality, and guiding it into self-consciousness. This is accomplished by self-consciousness thinking itself, and recognizing absolute existence to be the self-consciousness that thinks itself. With Descartes pure thought directed itself on that separation which we spoke of above. Self-consciousness, in the first place, thinks of itself as consciousness; therein is contained all objective reality, and the positive, intuitive reference of its reality to the other side. With Spinoza Thought and Being are opposed and yet identical; he has the intuitive perception of substance, but the knowledge of substance in his case is external. We have here the principle of reconciliation taking its rise from thought as such, in order to abrogate the subjectivity of thought: this is the case in Leibnitz’s monad, which possesses the power of representation.

7. In the second place, self-consciousness thinks of itself as being self-consciousness; in being self-conscious it is independent, but still in this independence it has a negative relation to what is outside self-consciousness. This is infinite subjectivity, which appears at one time as the critique of thought in the case of Kant, and at another time, in the case of Fichte, as the tendency or impulse towards the concrete. Absolute, pure, infinite form is expressed as self-consciousness, the Ego.

8. This is a light that breaks forth on spiritual substance, and shows absolute content and absolute form to be identical;—substance is in itself identical with knowledge. Self-consciousness thus, in the third place, recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive,—or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same, i.e. it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation. This is intellectual perception; but it is requisite in order that it should be in truth intellectual, that it should not be that merely immediate perception of the eternal and the divine which we hear of, but should be absolute knowledge. This intuitive perception which does not recognize itself is taken as starting-point as if it were absolutely presupposed; it has in itself intuitive perception only as immediate knowledge, and not as self-knowledge: or it knows nothing, and what it perceives it does not really know,—for, taken at its best, it consists of beautiful thoughts, but not knowledge.

But intellectual intuition is knowledge, since, in the first place, in spite of the separation of each of the opposed sides from the other, all external reality is known as internal. If it is known according to its essence, as it is, it shows itself as not existing of itself, but as essentially consisting in the movement of transition. This Heraclitean or Sceptical principle, that nothing is at rest, must be demonstrated of each individual thing; and thus in this consciousness—that the essence of each thing lies in determination, in what is the opposite of itself—there appears the apprehended unity with its opposite. Similarly this unity is, in the second place, to be recognized even in its essence; its essence as this identity is, in the same way, to pass over into its opposite, or to realize itself, to become for itself something different; and thus the opposition in it is brought about by itself. Again, it may be said of the opposition, in the third place, that it is not in the Absolute; this Absolute is existence, the eternal, &c. This is, however, itself an abstraction in which the Absolute is apprehended in a one-sided manner only, and the opposition is apprehended only as ideal (supra, p. 536); but in fact it is form, as the essential moment of the movement of the Absolute. This Absolute is not at rest, and that opposition is not the unresting Notion; for the Idea, unresting though it is, is yet at rest and satisfied in itself. Pure thought has advanced to the opposition of the subjective and objective; the true reconciliation of the opposition is the perception that this opposition, when pushed to its absolute extreme, resolves itself; as Schelling says, the opposites are in themselves identical—and not only in themselves, but eternal life consists in the very process of continually producing the opposition and continually reconciling it. To know opposition in unity, and unity in opposition—this is absolute knowledge; and science is the knowledge of this unity in its whole development by means of itself.

This is then the demand of all time and of Philosophy. A new epoch has arisen in the world. It would appear as if the World-spirit had at last succeeded in stripping off from itself all alien objective existence, and apprehending itself at last as absolute Spirit, in developing from itself what for it is objective, and keeping it within its own power, yet remaining at rest all the while. The strife of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness, which last seemed to the other to lie outside of itself, now comes to an end. Finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; and in this way absolute self-consciousness has, on the other hand, attained to the reality which it lacked before. This is the whole history of the world in general up to the present time, and the history of Philosophy in particular, the sole work of which is to depict this strife. Now, indeed, it seems to have reached its goal, when this absolute self-consciousness, which it had the work of representing, has ceased to be alien, and when spirit accordingly is realized as spirit. For it becomes such only as the result of its knowing itself to be absolute spirit, and this it knows in real scientific knowledge. Spirit produces itself as Nature, as the State; nature is its unconscious work, in the course of which it appears to itself something different, and not spirit; but in the State, in the deeds and life of History, as also of Art, it brings itself to pass with consciousness; it knows very various modes of its reality, yet they are only modes. In scientific knowledge alone it knows itself as absolute spirit; and this knowledge, or spirit, is its only true existence. This then is the standpoint of the present day, and the series of spiritual forms is with it for the present concluded.

At this point I bring this history of Philosophy to a close. It has been my desire that you should learn from it that the history of Philosophy is not a blind collection of fanciful ideas, nor a fortuitous progression. I have rather sought to show the necessary development of the successive philosophies from one another, so that the one of necessity presupposes another preceding it. The general result of the history of Philosophy is this: in the first place, that throughout all time there has been only one Philosophy, the contemporary differences of which constitute the necessary aspects of the one principle; in the second place, that the succession of philosophic systems is not due to chance, but represents the necessary succession of stages in the development of this science; in the third place, that the final philosophy of a period is the result of this development, and is truth in the highest form which the self-consciousness of spirit affords of itself. The latest philosophy contains therefore those which went before; it embraces in itself all the different stages thereof; it is the product and result of those that preceded it. We can now, for example, be Platonists no longer. Moreover we must raise ourselves once for all above the pettinesses of individual opinions, thoughts, objections, and difficulties; and also above our own vanity, as if our individual thoughts were of any particular value. For to apprehend the inward substantial spirit is the standpoint of the individual; as parts of the whole, individuals are like blind men, who are driven forward by the indwelling spirit of the whole. Our standpoint now is accordingly the knowledge of this Idea as spirit, as absolute Spirit, which in this way opposes to itself another spirit, the finite, the principle of which is to know absolute spirit, in order that absolute spirit may become existent for it. I have tried to develop and bring before your thoughts this series of successive spiritual forms pertaining to Philosophy in its progress, and to indicate the connection between them. This series is the true kingdom of spirits, the only kingdom of spirits that there is—it is a series which is not a multiplicity, nor does it even remain a series, if we understand thereby that one of its members merely follows on another; but in the very process of coming to the knowledge of itself it is transformed into the moments of the one Spirit, or the one self-present Spirit. This long procession of spirits is formed by the individual pulses which beat in its life; they are the organism of our substance, an absolutely necessary progression, which expresses nothing less than the nature of spirit itself, and which lives in us all. We have to give ear to its urgency—when the mole that is within forces its way on—and we have to make it a reality. It is my desire that this history of Philosophy should contain for you a summons to grasp the spirit of the time, which is present in us by nature, and—each in his own place—consciously to bring it from its natural condition, i.e. from its lifeless seclusion, into the light of day.

I have to express my thanks to you for the attention with which you have listened to me while I have been making this attempt; it is in great measure due to you that my efforts have met with so great a measure of success. And it has been a source of pleasure to myself to have been associated with you in this spiritual community; I ought not to speak of it as if it were a thing of the past, for I hope that a spiritual bond has been knit between us which will prove permanent. I bid you a most hearty farewell.

* * * * *

(The closing lecture of the series was given on the 22nd March, 1817; on the 14th March, 1818; on the 12th August, 1819; on the 23rd March, 1821; on the 30th March, 1824; on the 28th March, 1828; and on the 26th March, 1830.)

FOOTNOTES:

Neander. Genet. Entwickelung d. vornehmsten gnost. Systeme, p. 43.

Neander. Genetische Entwickelung, &c., pp. 87-91.

Tennemann, Vol. VIII Section I. p. 366; Buhle: Lehrb. d. Gesch. d. Phil. Part V. p. 36; Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 23, 24; 28, 29.

Moses Maimonides: More Nevochim, P. I. c. 71, pp. 133, 134 (Basil. 1629).

Abulphar. Dynast. IX. pp. 153, 171, 208, 209; Brucker. Hist. crit. phil. T. III. pp. 27-29, 44.

Moses Maimonides: More Nevochim, P. I. c. 73, pp. 152-155, 157-159.

Pocock. Specim. hist. Arab. pp. 78, 79; Hottinger. Biblioth. orient. c. 2, p. 219; Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 65, 66; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. p. 374.

Hottinger. Biblioth. orient. c. 2, p. 221; Gabriel Sionita: De moribus Orient. p. 16; Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 73, 74; Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. pp. 374, 375.

Leo Africanus: De illustrib. Arabum viris, c. 9, p. 268; Abulphar. Dynast. IX. p. 230, Tiedemann, Geist. d. spec. Phil. Vol. IV. p. 112, sqq., Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 80-84.

Leo Afric. De illustrib. Arabum viris, c. 12, p. 274; Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. pp. 93-95; Tiedemann, Geist. d. spec. Phil. Vol. IV. pp. 120-126, Tennemann, Vol. VIII. Section I. pp. 383-396.

Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. p. 97.

Brucker. Hist. cr. phil. T. III. p. 101; Tennemann, Vol. III.