History of Modern Philosophy · Chapter 29%part II. From Kant to the Present Time.% (8)
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The antinomy of the teleological judgment—thesis: all production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws; antithesis: some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws, but to judge them requires the causality of final causes—is insoluble so long as both propositions are taken for constitutive principles; but it is soluble when they are taken as regulative principles or standpoints for judgment. For it is in no wise contradictory, on the one hand, to continue the search for mechanical causes as far as this is in any way possible, and, on the other, clearly to recognize that, at last, this will still leave a remainder which we cannot make intelligible without calling to our aid the concept of ends. Assuming that it were possible to carry the explanation of life from life, from ancestral organisms (for the generatio aequivoca is an absurd theory) so far that the whole organic world should represent one great family descended from one primitive form as the common mother, even then the concept of final causes would only be pushed further back, not eliminated: the origin of the first organization will always resist mechanical explanation. Besides this mission of putting limits to causal derivation and of filling the gap in knowledge by a necessary, although subjective, way of looking at things, the Idea of ends has still another, the direct promotion of knowledge from efficient causes through the discovery of new causal problems. Thus, for example, physiology owes the impulse to the discovery of previously unnoticed mechanical connections (cf. also p. 382 note) to the question concerning the purpose of organs. As doctrines mechanism and teleology are irreconcilable and impossible; as rules or maxims of inquiry they are compatible, and the one as indispensable as the other.
After the problem of life, which is insoluble by means of the mechanical explanation, has necessitated the application of the concept of ends, the teleological principle must, at least by way of experiment, be extended to the whole of nature. This consideration culminates in the position that man, as the subject of morality, must be held to be the final aim of the world, for it is only in regard to a moral being that no further inquiry can be raised as to the purpose of its existence. It also repeats the moral argument for the existence of a supreme reason, thus supplementing physico-theology, which is inadequate to the demonstration of one absolutely perfect Deity; so that the third Critique, like the two preceding, concludes with the Idea of God as an object of practical faith.
* * * * *
There are three original and pregnant pairs of thoughts which cause Kant's name to shine in the philosophical sky as a star of the first magnitude: the demand for a critique of knowledge and the proof of a priori forms of knowledge; the moral autonomy and the categorical imperative; the regulative validity of the Ideas of reason and the practical knowledge of the transcendent world. No philosophical theory, no scientific hypothesis can henceforth avoid the duty of examining the value and legitimacy of its conclusions, as to whether they keep within the limits of the competency of human reason; whether Kant's determination of the origin and the limits of knowledge may count on continued favor or not, the fundamental critical idea, that reflection upon the nature and range of our cognitive faculty is indispensable, retains its validity for all cases and makes an end of all philosophizing at random.[1] No ethical system will with impunity pass by the autonomous legislation of reason and the unconditional imperative (the admonition of conscience translated into conceptual language): the nature and worth of moral will will be everywhere sought in vain if they are not recognized where Kant has found them—in the unselfish disposition, in that maxim which is fitted to become a general law for all rational beings. The doctrine of the Ideas, finally, reveals to us, beyond the daylight of phenomenal knowledge, the starlit landscape of another mode of looking at things,[2] in which satisfaction is afforded for the hitherto unmet wishes of the heart and demands of the reason.
[Footnote 1: "Reason consists just in this, that we are able to give account of all our concepts, opinions, and assertions, either on objective or subjective grounds."]
[Footnote 2: Those who regard all future metaphysics as refuted by the Critique of Reason are to be referred to the positive side of the Kantian doctrine of Ideas. Kant admits that the mechanical explanation does not satisfy reason, and that, besides it, a judgment according to Ideas is legitimate. When, therefore, the speculation of the constructive school gives an ideal interpretation of the world, it may be regarded as an extended application of "regulative principles," which exceeds its authority only when it professes to be "objective knowledge."]
The effect of the three Critiques upon the public was very varied. The first great work excited alarm by the sharpness of its negations and its destruction of dogmatic metaphysics, which to its earliest readers appeared to be the core of the matter; Kant was for them the universal destroyer. Then the Science of Knowledge brought into prominence the positive, boldly conquering side, the investigation of the conditions of empirical knowledge. In later times the endeavor has been made to do justice to both sides, but, in opposition to the overbold procedure of the constructive thinkers, who had fallen into a revived dogmatism, more in the spirit of caution and resignation. The second great work aroused glowing enthusiasm: "Kant is no mundane luminary," writes Jean Paul in regard to the Critique of Practical Reason, "but a whole solar system shining at once." The third, because of its subject and by its purpose of synthetic reconciliation between fields heretofore sharply separated, gained the sympathy of our poet-heroes Schiller and Goethe, and awakened in a young, speculative spirit Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Schelling reclaimed the intuitive understanding, which Kant had problematically attributed to the primal spirit, as the property of the philosopher, after Fichte had drawn attention to the fact that the consciousness of the categorical imperative, which Kant had not thoroughly investigated, could be nothing else than intellectual intuition, because in it knowing and doing coincide. Fichte, however, does not derive the material for his system from the Critique of Judgment, though he also had a high appreciation of it, but from the two earlier Critiques, the fundamental conceptions of which he—following the hint that practical and theoretical reason are only different applications of one and the same reason—brings into the closest connection. He unites the central idea of the practical philosophy, the freedom and autonomous legislation of the will, with the leading principle of the theoretical philosophy, the spontaneity of the understanding, under the original synthesis of the pure ego, in order to deduce from the activity of the ego not only the a priori forms of knowledge, but also, rejecting the thing in itself, the whole content of empirical consciousness. The thought which intervenes between the Kantian Critique of Reason and the development of thoroughgoing idealism by Fichte, with its criticisms of and additions to the former and its preparation for the latter, may be glanced at in a few supplementary pages.
%4. From Kant to Fichte.%
To begin with the works which aided in the extension and recognition of the Kantian philosophy, besides Kant's Prolegomena, the following stand in the front rank: Exposition of the Critique of Pure Reason, by the Königsberg court preacher, Johannes Schulz, 1784; the flowing Letters concerning the Kantian Philosophy, by K.L. Reinhold in Wieland's Deutscher Merkur, 1786-87; and the Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung, in Jena, founded in 1785, and edited by the philologist Schütz and the jurist Hufeland, which offered itself as the organ of the new doctrine. Jena became the home and principal stronghold of Kantianism; while by the beginning of the nineteenth century almost all German chairs belonged to it, and the non-philosophical sciences as well received from it stimulation and guiding ideas.
In the camp of the enemy there was no less of activity. The Wolffian, Eberhard of Halle, founded a special journal for the purpose of opposing the Kantian philosophy: the Philosophisches Magazin, 1789, continued from 1792 as the Philosophisches Archiv. The Illumination collected its forces in the Philosophische Bibliothek, edited by Feder and Meiners. Nicolai waved the banner of common sense in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, and in satirical romances, and was handled as he deserved by the heroes of poetry and philosophy (cf. the Xenien of Goethe and Schiller, Kant's Letter on Bookmaking, and Fichte's cutting disposal of him, Nicolai's Life and Peculiar Opinions). The attacks of the faith-philosophers have been already noticed (pp. 310-314).
The advance from Kant to Fichte was preparing alike among friends and enemies, and this in two points. The demand was in part for a formal complement (a first principle from which the Kantian results could be deduced, and by which the dualism of sense and understanding could be overcome), in part for material correction (the removal of the thing in itself) and development (to radical idealism). Karl Leonhard Reinhold (born at Vienna in 1758; fled from a college of the St. Barnabite order, 1783; in 1787-94 professor in Jena, and then as the successor of Tetens in Kiel, where he died in 1823) undertook the former task in his Attempt at a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation, 1789. Kant's classical theory of the faculty of cognition requires for its foundation a theory of the faculty of representation, or an elementary philosophy, which shall take for its object the deduction of the several functions of reason (intuition, concept, Idea) from the original activity of representation. The Kantian philosophy lacks a first principle, which, as first, cannot be demonstrable, but only a fact immediately evident and admitted by everyone. The primal fact, which we seek, is consciousness. No one can dispute that every representation contains three things: the subject, the object, and, between the two, the activity of representation. Accordingly the principle of consciousness runs: "The representation is distinguished in consciousness from the represented [object] and the representing [subject], and is referred to both." From this first principle Reinhold endeavors to deduce the well-known principles of the material manifold given by the action of objects, and the forms of representation spontaneously produced by the subject, which combine this manifold into unity. When, a few years later, Fichte's Science of Knowledge brilliantly succeeded in bridging the gap between sense and understanding by means of a first principle, thus accomplishing what Reinhold had attempted, the latter became one of his adherents, only to attach himself subsequently to Jacobi, and then to Bardili (Outlines of Logic, 1800), and to end with a verbal philosophy lacking both in influence and permanence.
In Reinhold's elementary philosophy the thing in itself was changed from a problematical, negative, merely limiting concept into a positive element of doctrine. Objections were raised against Kantianism, as thus dogmatically modified in the direction of realism, by Schulze, Maimon, and Beck—by the first for purposes of attack, by the second in order to further development, and by the third with an exegetical purpose. Gottlob Ernst Schulze, professor in Helmstädt, and from 1810 in Göttingen, in his Aenesidemus (1792, published anonymously), which was followed later by psychological works, defended the skeptical position in opposition to the Critique of Reason. Hume's skepticism remains unrefuted by Kant and Reinhold. The thing in itself, which is to produce the material of representation by affecting the senses, is a self-contradictory idea. The application of the category of cause to things in themselves violates the doctrine that the latter are unknowable and that the use of the pure concepts of the understanding beyond the sphere of experience is inadmissible. The transcendental philosophy has never proved that the ground of the material of representation cannot, just as the form thereof, reside in the subject itself.
Side by side with the anti-critical skepticism of Aenesidemus-Schulze, Salomon Maimon (died 1800; cf. Witte, 1876), who was highly esteemed by the greatest philosophers of his time, represents critical skepticism. With Reinhold he holds consciousness (as the combination of a manifold into objective unity) to be the common root of sensibility and understanding, and with Schulze, the concept of the thing in itself to be an imaginary or irrational quantity, a thought that cannot be carried out; it is not only unknowable, but unthinkable. That alone is knowable which we ourselves produce, hence only the form of representation. The matter of representation is "given," but this does not mean that it arises from the action of the thing in itself, but only that we do not know its origin. Understanding and sense, or spontaneity and receptivity, do not differ generically, but only in degree, viz., as complete and incomplete consciousness. Sensation is an incomplete consciousness, because we do not know how its object arises.
By the removal of the thing in itself Aenesidemus-Schulze sought to refute the Kantian theory and Maimon to improve it. Sigismund Beck (1761-1840), in his Only Possible Standpoint from which the Critical Philosophy must be Judged, 1796,[1] seeks by it to elucidate the Kantian theory, holding up idealism as its true meaning. In opposition to the usual opinion that a representation is true when it agrees with its object, he points to the impossibility of comparing the one with the other. Of objects out of consciousness we can know nothing; after the removal of all that is subjective there is nothing positive left of the representation. Everything in it is produced by us; the matter arises together with the form through the "original synthesis."
[Footnote 1: This book forms the third volume of his Expository Abridgment of the Critical Writings of Professor Kant; in the same year appeared the Outlines of the Critical Philosophy. Cf. on Beck, Dilthey in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. ii., 1889, pp. 592-650.]
The last mentioned attempts to develop the Kantian philosophy were so far surpassed by Fichte's great achievement that they have received from their own age and from posterity a less grateful appreciation and remembrance than was essentially their due. A phenomenon of a different sort, which is also to be placed at the threshold between Kant and Fichte, but which forms rather a supplement to the noëtics and ethics of the latter than a link in the transition to them, has, on the contrary, gained an honorable position in the memory of the German people, viz., Schiller's aesthetics.[1] In its center stand the Kantian antithesis of sensibility and reason and the reconciliation of the two sides of human nature brought about by its occupation with the beautiful. Artistic activity or the play-impulse mediates between the lower, sensuous matter-impulse and the higher, rational form-impulse, and unites the, two in harmonious co-operation. Where appetite seeks after satisfaction, and where the strict idea of duty rules, there only half the man is occupied; neither lust nor moral worth is beautiful. In order that beauty and grace may arise, the matter-impulse and the form-impulse, or sensibility and reason, must manifest themselves uniformly and in harmony. Only when he "plays" is man wholly and entirely man; only through art is the development of humanity possible. The discernment of the fact that the beautiful brings into equilibrium the two fundamental impulses, one or the other of which preponderates in sensuous desire and in moral volition, does not of itself decide the relative rank of artistic and moral activity. The recognition of this mediating position of art may be connected with the view that it forms a transitional stage toward and a means of education for morality, as well as with the other, that in it human nature attains its completion. Evidence of both views can be found in Schiller's writings. At first he favors the Kantian moralism, which admits nothing higher than the good will, and sets art the task of educating men up to morality by ennobling their natural impulses. Gradually, however, aesthetic activity changes in his view from a preparation for morality into the ultimate goal of human endeavor. Peaceful reconciliation is of more worth than the spirit's hardly gained victory in the conflict with the sensibility; fine feeling is more than rational volition; the highest ideal is the beautiful soul, in which inclination not merely obeys the command of duty, but anticipates it.
[Footnote 1: The most important of Schiller's aesthetic essays are those On Grace and Dignity, 1793; On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795-96; and the Letters on Aesthetic Education, intermediate between them. Cf. Kuno Fischer, Schiller als Philosoph, 1858, 2d ed. (Schillerschriften, iii., iv.) 1891-92.]
Fichte is a Kantian in about the same sense that Plato was a Socratic. Instead of taking up and developing particular critical problems he makes the vivifying kernel, the soul of criticism, his own. With the self-activity of reason (as a real force and as a problem) for his fundamental idea, he outlines with magnificent boldness a new view of the world, in which the idealism concealed in Kant's philosophy under the shell of cautious limitations was roused into vigorous life, and the great Königsberger's noble words on the freedom, the position, and the power of the spirit translated from the language of sober foresight into that of vigorous enthusiasm. The world can be understood only from the standpoint of spirit, the spirit only from the will. The ego is pure activity, and all reality its product. Fichte's system is all life and action: its aim is not to mediate knowledge, but to summon the hearer and reader to the production of a new and pregnant fundamental view, in which the will is as much a participant as the understanding; it begins not with a concept or a proposition, but with a demand for action (posit thyself; do consciously what thou hast done unconsciously so often as thou hast called thyself I; analyze, then, the act of self-consciousness, and cognize in their elements the forces from which all reality proceeds); its God is not a completed absolute substance, but a self-realizing world-order. This inner vivacity of the Fichtean principle, which recalls the pure actuality of Aristotle's [Greek: nous] and the ceaseless becoming of Heraclitus, finds its complete parallel in the fact that, although he was wanting neither in logical consecutiveness nor in the talent for luminous and popular exposition, Fichte felt continually driven to express his ideas in new forms, and, just when he seemed to have succeeded in saying what he meant with the greatest clearness, again unsatisfied, to seek still more exact and evident renderings for his fundamental position, which proved so difficult to formulate.
The author of the Wissenschaftslehre was the son of a poor ribbon maker, and was born at Rammenau in Lusatia in 1762. The talents of the boy induced the Freiherr von Miltiz to give him the advantage of a good education. Fichte attended school in Meissen and in Pforta, and was a student of theology at the universities of Jena and Leipsic. While a tutor in Zurich he made the acquaintance of Lavater and Pestalozzi, as well as of his future wife, Johanna Rahn, a niece of Klopstock. Returning to Leipsic, his whole mode of thought was revolutionized by the Kantian philosophy, in which it was his duty to instruct a pupil. This gives to the mind, as his letters confess, an inconceivable elevation above all earthly things. "I have adopted a nobler morality, and, instead of occupying myself with things without me, have been occupied more with myself." "I now believe with all my heart in human freedom, and am convinced that only on this supposition duty and virtue of any kind are possible." "I live in a new world since I have read the Critique of Practical Reason. Things which I believed never could be proved to me, e.g., the idea of an absolute freedom and duty, have been proved, and I feel the happier for it. It is inconceivable what reverence for humanity, what power this philosophy gives us, what a blessing it is for an age in which the citadels of morality had been destroyed, and the idea of duty blotted out from all the dictionaries!" A journey to Warsaw, whither he had been attracted by the expectation of securing a position as a private tutor, soon afforded him the opportunity of visiting at Königsberg the author of the system which had effected so radical a transformation in his convictions. His rapidly written treatise, Essay toward a Critique of All Revelation, attained the end to which its inception was due by gaining for its author a favorable reception from the honored master. Kant secured for Fichte a tutor's position in Dantzic, and a publisher for his maiden work. When this appeared, at Easter, 1792, the name of its author was by oversight omitted from the title page, together with the preface, which had been furnished after the rest of the book; and as the anonymous work was universally ascribed to Kant (whose religious philosophy was at this time eagerly looked for), the young writer became famous at a stroke as soon as the error was explained. A second edition was issued as early as the following year.
After his marriage in Zurich, where he had completed several political treatises (the address, Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, who have hitherto suppressed it, Heliopolis in the Last Year of the Old Darkness, and the two Hefte, Contributions toward the Correction of the Public Judgment on the French Revolution, 1793), Fichte accepted, in 1794, a call to Jena, in place of Reinhold, who had gone to Kiel, and whose popularity was soon exceeded by his own. The same year saw the birth of the Wissenschaftslehre. His stay in Jena was embittered by conflicts with the clergy, who took offense at his ethical lectures (On the Vocation of the Scholar) held on Sunday mornings (though not at an hour which interfered with church service), and with the students, who, after they had been untrue to their decision—which they had formed as a result of these lectures—to dissolve their societies or orders, gave vent to their spite by repeatedly smashing the windows of Fichte's residence. Accordingly he took leave of absence, and spent the summer of 1795 in Osmannstädt. The years 1796-98, in which, besides the two Introductions to the Science of Knowledge, the Natural Right and the Science of Ethics (one of the most all important works in German philosophical literature) appeared, mark the culmination of Fichte's famous labors. The so-called atheistic controversy[1] resulted in Fichte's departure from Jena. The Philosophisches Journal, which since 1797 had been edited by Fichte in association with Niethammer, had published an article by Magister Forberg, rector at Saalfeld, entitled "The Development of the Concept of Religion," and as a conciliating introduction to this a short essay by Fichte, "On the Ground of our Belief in a Divine Government of the World."[2] For this it was confiscated by the Dresden government on the charge of containing atheistical matter, while other courts were summoned to take like action. In Weimar hopes were entertained of an amicable adjustment of the matter. But when Fichte, after publishing two vindications[3] couched in vehement language, had in a private letter uttered the threat that he would answer with his resignation any censure proceeding from the University Senate, not only was censure for indiscretion actually imposed, but his (threatened) resignation accepted.
[Footnote 1: Cf. Karl August Hase, Jenaisches Fichtebüchlein, 1856.]
[Footnote 2: It is a mistake, Fichte writes here, referring to the conclusion of Forberg's article ("Is there a God? It is and remains uncertain," etc.), to say that it is doubtful whether there is a God or not. That there is a moral order of the world, which assigns to each rational individual his determined place and counts on his work, is most certain, nay, it is the ground of all other certitude. The living and operative moral order (ordo ordinans) is itself God; we need no other God, and can conceive no other. There is no ground in reason for going beyond this world order to postulate a particular being as its cause. Whoever ascribes personality and consciousness to this particular being makes it finite; consciousness belongs only to the individual, limited ego. And it is allowable to state this frankly and to beat down the prattle of the schools, in order that the true religion of joyous well-doing may lift up its head.]
[Footnote 3: Appeal to the Public, and Formal Defense against the Charge of Atheism, 1799. The first of these maintains that Fichte's standpoint and that of his opponents are related as duty and advantage, sensible and suprasensible, and that the substantial God of his accusers, to be derived from the sensibility, is, as personified fate, as the distributer of all happiness and unhappiness to finite beings, a miserable fetich.]
Going to Berlin, Fichte found a friendly government, a numerous public for his lectures, and a stimulating circle of friends in the romanticists, the brothers Schlegel, Tieck, Schleiermacher, etc. In the first years of his Berlin residence there appeared The Vocation of Man. The Exclusive Commercial State, 1800; The Sun-clear Report to the Larger Public on the Essential Nature of the New Philosophy, and the Answer to Reinhold, 1801. Three works, which were the outcome of his lectures and were published in the year 1806 (Characteristics of the Present Age, The Nature of the Scholar, Way to the Blessed Life or Doctrine of Religion), form a connected whole. In the summer of 1805 Fichte filled a professorship at Erlangen, and later, after the outbreak of the war, he occupied for a short time a chair at Königsberg, finding a permanent university position at the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810. His glowing Addresses to the German Nation, 1808, which essentially aided in arousing the national spirit, have caused his name to live as one of the greatest of orators and most ardent of patriots in circles of the German people where his philosophical importance cannot be understood. His death in 1814 was also a result of unselfish labor in the service of the Fatherland. He succumbed to a nervous fever contracted from his wife, who, with self-sacrifice equal to his own, had shared in the care of the wounded, and who had brought the contagion back with her from the hospital. On his monument is inscribed the beautiful text, "The teachers shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars that shine forever and ever." Forberg in his journal records this estimate: The leading trait in Fichte's character is his absolute integrity. All his words are weighty and important. His principles are stern and little modified by affability. The spirit of his philosophy is proud and courageous, one which does not so much lead as possess us and carry us along. His philosophemes are inquiries in which we see the truth arise before our eyes, and which just for this reason lay the foundations of science and conviction.
The philosopher's son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte (his own name was Johann Gottlieb), wrote a biography of his father (1830; 2d ed., 1862), and supervised the publication of both the Posthumous Works (1834-35, 3 vols.) and the Collected Works (1845-46, 8 vols.). The simple and luminous Facts of Consciousness of 1811, or 1817 (not the lecture of 1813 with the same title), is especially valuable as an introduction to the system. Among the many redactions of the Wissenschaftslehre, the epoch-making Foundation of the whole Science of Knowledge, 1794, with the two Introductions to the Science of Knowledge, 1797, takes the first rank, while of the practical works the most important are the Foundation of Natural Right according to the Principles of the Science of Knowledge, 1796, and the System of the Science of Ethics according to the Principles of the Science of Knowledge, 1798, and next to these the Lectures on the Theory of the State, 1820 (delivered in 1813).[1]
[Footnote 1: At the same time as J.H. Löwe's book Die Philosophie Fichtes, 1862, there appeared in celebration of the centenary of Fichte's birthyear, or birthday, a large number of minor essays and addresses by Friedrich Harms, A.L. Kym, Trendelenburg, Franz Hoffman, Karl Heyder, F.C. Lott, Karl Köstlin, J.B. Meyer, and others (cf. Reichlin-Meldegg in vol. xlii. of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie). Lasson has written, 1863, on Fichte's relation to Church and state, Zeller on Fichte as a political thinker (Vorträge und Abhandlungen, 1865), and F. Zimmer on his philosophy of religion. Among foreign works we may note Adamson's Fichte, 1881, and the English translations of several of Fichte's works by Kroeger [Science of Knowledge, 1868; Science of Rights, 1869—both also, 1889] and William Smith [Popular Writings, 4th ed., 1889; also Everett's Fichte's Science of Knowledge (Griggs's Philosophical Classics, 1884), and several translations in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, including one of The Facts of Consciousness.—TR.]]
%1. The Science of Knowledge.%
%(a) The Problem.%—In Fichte's judgment Kant did not succeed in carrying through the transformation in thought which it was his aim to effect, because the age did not understand the spirit of his philosophy. This spirit, and with it the great service of Kant, consists in transcendental idealism, which by the doctrine that objects conform themselves to representations, not representations to objects, draws philosophy away from external objects and leads it back into ourselves. We have followed the letter, he thinks, instead of the spirit of Kant, and because of a few passages with a dogmatic ring, whose references to a given matter, the thing in itself, and the like, were intended only as preliminary, have overlooked the numberless others in which the contrary is distinctly maintained. Thus the interpreters of Kant, using their own prejudices as a criterion, have read into him exactly that which he sought to refute, and have made the destroyer of all dogmatism himself a dogmatist; thus in the Kantianism of the Kantians there has sprung up a marvelous combination of crude dogmatism and uncompromising idealism. Though such an absurd mingling of entirely heterogeneous elements may be excused in the case of interpreters and successors, who have had to construct for themselves the guiding principle of the whole from their study of the critical writings, yet we cannot assume it in the author of the system, unless we believe the Critique of Pure Reason the result of the strangest chance, and not the work of intellect. Two men only, Beck, the teacher of the Standpoint, and Jacobi, the clearest mind of the century, are to be mentioned with respect as having risen above the confusion of the time to the perception that Kant teaches idealism, that, according to him, the object is not given, but made.