Fichte's Science of Knowledge/Chapter II

by Charles Carroll Everett

CHAPTER II.

PROBLEMS: CONSIDERED IN RELATION TO KANT.

THE reader of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” after toiling as best he can through analyses and abstractions, is pleasantly surprised by a picture which Kant suddenly conjures up before his imagination. It is that of an island, “The Land of Truth” (a charming name), and of the stormy and misty sea by which it is surrounded,—a sea that tempts ever to fascinating, if fruitless, adventures.^[1] Not only had Kant, according to his just boast in this passage, explored and mapped out this island, but, if I may venture to carry out the figure a little further, upon it he had established a kingdom.

Fichte was among the first to yield enthusiastic allegiance to the new ruler. He devoted to Kant’s service the full power of his maiden lance. He even assumed the place of chief lieutenant to his leader, and this, at first, not wholly without the encouragement of Kant himself. He soon found, however, that much remained to be accomplished, and that, if he would maintain the authority of his master, he must complete his work. He set himself to traverse regions that remained unexplored, to subdue unconquered or rebellious territories, to codify the laws; in a word, to introduce order into the whole empire. Of course, he could not do this without bringing changes into the laws and methods of the realm. These seemed to him so essential that he adopted them without hesitation, and in good faith. To his surprise, however, his master failed to recognize his service. He even found himself declared a rebel and an outlaw. Then first did he feel himself compelled, in order to accomplish the purposes he had at heart, to set up an empire of his own.

By this illustration, I have attempted to present, in as vivid a manner as possible, the relation of Fichte to Kant. Fichte, as we have seen, resolved to devote the best years of his life to the promulgation and defence of the critical philosophy. He, however, could teach nothing that he did not absolutely understand; and defend nothing that he could not wholly believe. If he was to become the expounder of the new philosophy, this philosophy must be completely wrought over in his own mind, so that it should come forth as his own philosophy. It must be perfectly transparent and perfectly organized. It must become a unit according to his idea of unity. In accomplishing this result, all the imperfections of the system of Kant were forced upon his attention. Whether or not he may be regarded as having been successful in his attempt to complete the philosophy of Kant, at least it is true that this attempt, though made in a positive rather than in a negative sense, remains one of the best criticisms upon the work of Kant. Qui s’excuse s’accuse; in like manner his effort to fortify the weak places in Kant’s system reveals them. These weak places Fichte sometimes covers by a new interpretation of the teaching of Kant, which he defends, not so much by an examination of the words of the master, as by insisting that any other meaning than that which he suggests would be absurd. If his explanation does not express the real thought of Kant, it may well be understood that this is a kind of defence which no author would welcome. Sometimes he reconstructs parts of the system, of which the construction had seemed imperfect. The whole arrangement he puts upon a new basis. Thus, while undertaking, in good faith, to defend the old system, he was really founding a new. Kant must have witnessed with some surprise the growth of this new philosophy which claimed to be his own.

One great difference between the new form and the old sprang from the fresh life that was put into the system. Fichte poured into it his whole eager and impetuous soul. The work which Kant had shaped with his careful chisel, pausing only now and then to admire its fair proportions and the dignity of its bearing, has suddenly sprung into life. It is not strange that in this living and breathing form, in these features aglow with the fire of a lofty enthusiasm, Kant failed to recognize the work of his own hand. How far the work remained the same, and how far it was indeed transformed by the process which it had undergone, we shall discover as we advance.

We have now to inquire what were some of the most important problems which, in the judgment of Fichte, Kant had left unsolved, and to which he was forced to seek an answer.

I. The Deduction of the Categories.

One of the most important things which remained for Fichte to accomplish, in order to give unity to the system, was the deduction of the Categories from some common principle. It has often, from the first, been urged in criticism of Kant, that he accepted the Categories, and used them without establishing them by any a priori reasoning, and thus without making them an organic part of his system. As is well known, he accepted, largely, the arrangement which the science of logic had made of the various forms of judgment, and formed a system of Categories corresponding to these. Whether the system of Categories were or were not complete, whether the analysis were carried as far as analysis is possible; all this was left undetermined, except so far as the accuracy of the science of logic could be trusted. Further, the question whether the table be or be not complete, is not the most important one. Accuracy of result is not sufficient for philosophy. What is demanded is transparency of process and result. The process must be seen in its necessity, and the result must thus carry the evidence of its truth within itself. The squaring of the circle, for instance, by means of tin vessels, square and round, the liquid contents of which may be compared together, carries not one step nearer to the solution of the problem of the mathematician. The table of judgments, which Kant made the basis of his table of Categories, had been reached by a purely a posteriori process. Thus a crude and foreign element was introduced into the very heart of the system of Kant.

I am not sure that criticism of Kant in regard to this matter is wholly just. The fact is, of course, just as it is commonly stated. There is here in Kant’s system important material taken bodily from without, and used as if it had been scientifically deduced. Whether or not, in accepting this material, Kant did not adopt the means best adapted to the end he had in view, is another question. Kant was not so much the builder up of a system, as one who cleared a space upon which a system could be reared. He was a conqueror rather than a founder. He may be regarded as the Julius Caesar, as Hegel was the Augustus, of modern philosophy. His work was thus critical rather than constructive. It was to break up the hard and crude notions that men had of a solid, material world, wholly independent of spiritual presence, and to substitute for this the thought of an ideal world, which is for and of the spirit alone. This he could best do by taking formulas which men had been trained to regard as the most fundamental and certain, analyzing the notions which these involved, and thus showing that they had no meaning or application beyond the mind itself. The science of logic furnished these formulas. By accepting them and analyzing them in the manner that has been indicated, Kant was carrying the war into the enemy’s country, and winning a victory more substantial than could be obtained in any other way.

The criticism that has been made of Kant’s method in regard to this particular should be extended, if it is legitimate, to much of his work. His method, throughout, was to proceed not from above, but from below. He did not, for instance, like Schopenhauer, attempt to deduce the forms of perception—time and space. He accepted these as he found them in the common consciousness, and sought only to show that they have no force or meaning beyond the mind itself. Passing from these to the Categories, his interest was to show that these latter are meaningless without the forms of perception, which he had before proved to be merely phenomenal. The same is true of his treatment of all the spiritual and intellectual functions. He took them as he found them.

This, then, was Kant’s method. For his purposes, I am not sure that it was not the best. When the battle for idealism had been fought and won, then came the time for the deduction and organization which a constructive philosophy demands.

We can thus understand what was one of the most important and fundamental problems which Fichte undertook to solve. The attempt to deduce from the nature of consciousness, the forms of perception, the mental faculties, and the Categories, is what, more than anything else, gives its character to his system,—it may even be said to constitute his system, and to mark the philosophical movement to which he gave, to a large degree, the impulse. Hegel is enthusiastic in his praise of the undertaking.^[2] He speaks of the deduction as something that had not occurred to any man, from Aristotle down; and, again, he says that this was the first reasonable attempt in the world to deduce the Categories. Doubtless, in this attempt, Hegel found a challenge and a stimulus to his own great work. If, then, the success of Fichte in this undertaking was not a complete success,—and certainly the process is so bound up with his own system as to have little value outside of it,—yet the failure involved a triumph more fruitful than most victories. Fichte had pointed out the way which philosophy must take for its next advance. If it was not he who was destined to create the empire which Kant had founded, he was at least one of those who did the most to make the creation possible.

II. The Thing-in-itself.

Another point in regard to which the work of Kant needed completion, is his teaching in regard to what he called the Thing-in-itself. As is well known, according to the philosophy of Kant, all objects of sensuous perception are mere phenomena. The Categories of the understanding, being bound up with the forms of perception, have no use to us apart from these. Thus, the world in which we live, and all the objects and relations that constitute it, are in the mind alone. With this phenomenal world, which is in and for the mind only, Kant contrasted, or has been generally understood to contrast, the thing which is behind and beyond all phenomena, and which manifests its being, though not its nature, through them. This Thing-in-itself is rather assumed than taught by Kant. He takes it for granted, as something in regard to which there can be neither doubt nor discussion. This Thing-in-itself he contrasts not merely with the phenomena, but also with what, in any real and positive sense, may be called Noumenon. By the Noumenon, properly so called, he understands that which may be an object for the understanding, taken apart from any relation to perception. In his discussion of the Noumenon, he means chiefly to rebuke the use of expressions that would suggest the thought of a noumenal or intelligible world. This intelligible world, as contrasted with the sensible world, he insists has no meaning for us, and the use of phrases implying such a distinction is, he maintains, wholly vicious and misleading. In a negative sense, indeed, the Thing-in-itself may be called a Noumenon, and was so called by Kant, but in a negative sense only.^[3] The understanding must recognize it, but must admit that the Categories have no application to it. We have in the Thing-in-itself only the limit at which our thought must stop. This Thing-in-itself, shut out from the realm of phenomena, and not fairly admitted into that of noumena, may well be said, in the phrase of Hegel, to hover like a pale ghost outside the system of Kant.

When we look at the matter more closely, we see that the whole account of this foreign element is illogical, and the assumption of it without ground. This has been, indeed, one of the earliest and most often repeated, as it is one of the most obvious, criticisms of the system of Kant. If the Categories, it is said, do not apply to it, how do we reach any idea of its existence? If it does not stand related to the world of phenomena, either as substance or cause, what is the relation in which it stands to it? The very word Relation expresses a Category. Relation in general, as well as any particular relation, is, according to Kant, for and of the mind alone. The Thing-in-itself can be considered to stand, then, in absolutely no relation to the phenomenon. If it stood in any relation to it, it would thereby become embraced in our system of Categories, from which it has been absolutely excluded. What leads us then to assume the existence, outside the mind, of something that has absolutely no relation to anything that is in the mind? It is assumed as a point of unity for the perception, as the I is assumed as the principle of unity in thought. But the term Unity itself designates one of these omnipresent Categories. Kant, then, would seem to have preserved this bit of natural realism in his system, and to have uttered it with a naïve unconsciousness as something so much a matter of course as to require neither thought nor justification.

In all this, however, Fichte maintains that Kant has been wholly misunderstood. He maintains that by the Thing-in-itself, Kant meant nothing extra mentem; that he meant merely the unity and absolute objectivity which the mind gives in perception to its own creations. The difficulty of using any term in regard to this matter, that may be absolutely free from any ambiguity, may make the interpretation given by Fichte seem less extravagant than it might at first sight appear. The terms Objects and Objective are often used under the impression that they express something wholly foreign to the mind. The terms Subjective and Objective are often used as if they meant the same as Inner and Outer. But the Object implies the Subject, and thus may be considered as wholly bound up with it. That the Object need not be considered as foreign to the Subject may be seen from the fact that in consciousness the self is objective to itself. Thus the term Object, however strongly emphasized, does not necessarily—strictly speaking, it does not possibly—take us beyond the limits of the mind. Even the term Thing in-itself, though apparently invented for this very purpose, does not take us necessarily beyond the mind; for, if there is no other world than the mental world, then the Thing-in-itself will have its being in this. If our ultimate fact be sensation, the Thing-in-itself will be sensation; if it be thought, the Thing-in-itself will be thought; if it be spirit, the Thing-in-itself will be spirit. No form of speech occurs to me as being wholly unambiguous in this connection, except that which I have used in this discussion. The words In mente and Extra mentem, or their equivalents, seem free from any possible ambiguity. Kant, however, did not use these words, and thus there is always space for discussion as to his real meaning.

Fichte defends his view of Kant’s system by appealing to this ambiguity. He affirms that so long as Kant does not expressly say that, in philosophy, sensation must be explained by a transcendental object, which is external to us, so long he will not believe that Kant had the view that is so often ascribed to him. He adds that if Kant ever does make such a statement, he shall consider the “Critique of Pure Reason” to be rather a work of the strangest chance than of a mind.^[4]

The fact remained, however, that the “Kantians” not only understood Kant to take the position which Fichte regarded as so absurd, but also that they frankly accepted it at his hands. They held Kant’s view of the Categories, of their inapplicability beyond the mind, and of the Thing-in-itself that was held to be beyond their reach though really it was simply an embodiment of them. This fact was urged against Fichte: You say that no mind can hold a position so self-contradictory; but here you have, before you, minds that really do hold this position; consequently, you have no right to interpret Kant’s writings by any argument based upon such a theoretical impossibility. To this, Fichte replied in effect, that we must distinguish between the minds that accept a system at second hand, and the mind that originally thought it out. Many an inconsequence could be accepted by the former that would be impossible to the latter. The man who had first framed a system, who had himself explored all its relations, who had logically developed it from its inception, must hold it as a unity. He must be able to think of it as a whole. He could not thus fail to be sensible to any self-contradiction so obvious as that under consideration; while those who had accepted the system from without might hold it mechanically, with no sense of this living unity, and thus might naturally be less sensitive to any contradiction existing in the system as they held it. If a boy repeats by rote, or with a partial comprehension, a mathematical demonstration, we are not surprised at any confusion that may exist among the figures. Such a confusion existing, undetected, in the work of the master who originated the demonstration would surprise us.

If, however, we accept the commonly received interpretation of Kant’s language in regard to the Thing-in-itself, and at the same time see the contradiction which this interpretation introduces into his work, how can we meet the difficulty that is urged by Fichte? How can we suppose it possible for a master who has wrought out the idealistic philosophy, as we find it embodied in Kant’s Critique, to admit into his view of things such a wholly foreign and irreconcilable element? Would it seem too bold to suggest that this result may have been more easy because Kant received the fundamental position of his system from without? It was Hume who reached the conception of a purely idealistic view of the universe. It was he who considered the processes of the mind as complete in themselves; in whose system we find no hint of any influence from the world outside the mind, nor any hint of a permanent ego behind the mind. This was with him an original thought, and the clearness of its utterance satisfies entirely the claim that Fichte makes for such originality. But Hume by the use of the word, impression, to represent the more vivid perceptions of the mind, prepared a dangerous pitfall for those who should come after him. He posted, it is true, a warning as distinctly and conspicuously as seemed necessary, by stating in a note that he uses the term Impression not to express the manner in which our lively perceptions are produced, but merely the perceptions themselves.^[5] In spite of this warning, many students of Hume, who might have been supposed to keep a better watch over their steps, have stumbled and fallen into the pitfall. Can it be that Kant himself is of the number? With such questions, and even with the interpretation of Kant’s statements in regard to the Thing-in-itself, we have here nothing to do. Our business is simply to emphasize the fact that here is a portion of Kant’s work that needs completion.

It may help us to follow with a clear understanding the reasoning of Fichte, to ask, in advance, in what ways it is possible to complete the thought of the Thing-in-itself, while remaining wholly within the sphere of Kant’s system. In other words, we have to ask what methods of treatment recognized by Kant may be applied to it, or into what classifications adopted by him it may be introduced. It is obvious that there are in the system of Kant two methods of procedure, either of which may be employed. By this, I affirm simply the formal possibility of such procedure; whether either method would be found practicable, is a question that is not here raised. Two classes of beings are recognized by Kant. The first class includes phenomenal existences,—those which exist in the mind itself. We have, here, the whole objective world in the strict sense of this term. We have the Objects of perception filled out and bound together by the Categories of the understanding. These Objects are given directly in consciousness. The Thing-in-itself could be put into the same division with them. It could be regarded as a product of the Categories, embodying them, and placed, by the mind, behind the objects of its creation to give them unity, solidity, and permanence. In other words, instead of placing the Thing-in-itself outside the mind, it would be inclosed within the mind; the Categories of the understanding being stretched so as to receive it.

Over against the phenomenal existences, here described, is the Absolute Being, or, God. Those are the product of the intellectual or theoretical powers; this is a postulate of the practical reason. It is reached only by an act of faith. Its reality is postulated, not proved. We cannot say that it is; we can only say that it must be. It would be at least formally possible to look upon the Thing-in-itself, from a similar point of view, to accept it as real, but to regard it also as a postulate, as something held by a practical necessity, without logical grounds, and without comprehension.

Either of these methods could be followed without introducing any new element into the system of Kant. Any fundamentally different method would take us out of the sphere of Kant’s philosophy. Whether Fichte adopted either of these methods, whether he did not incline to both, as he looked at the matter in one aspect or another, and how true he remained to the Kantian tradition, we shall see as we advance.

III. Problems Suggested by the Practical Reason.

A third very important problem, or group of problems, is suggested by the work of Kant. His system culminates in the thought of the moral law, of freedom, of God, and of immortality. These are recognized as standing in a profound and intimate relation to one another. Man’s freedom finds its scope and its evidence in morality. The moral law finds its scope and its reality in human freedom. The being of God is a postulate of the moral law, which would be idle and fruitless without it. The idea of God is thus practically the product of the moral law, and includes nothing that is not suggested by it. Immortality is also a postulate of the moral law.

The statements that Kant makes, in regard to the relation of God and immortality to the moral law, are not wholly free from contradiction. His first account of the matter is given near the close of the “Critique of Pure Reason.” It is here treated under the special head, “What shall I hope?” and under the more general head, “The Ideal of the Highest Good.” Two elements are recognized as constituting the highest good. One of these elements is righteousness; the other is happiness. In the idea of the highest good, these, we are told, stand to one another in a definite relation; happiness is exactly proportioned to desert. This relation between obedience to duty and happiness Kant maintains to be fundamental. Indeed duty would, he affirms, be powerless, if we had no reason to believe that happiness would follow from its accomplishment. Duty, indeed, should always be the prime motive of our acts; but this motive would not be sufficient of itself to move us. If, then, happiness is to be made proportionate to desert, we must postulate a power that can accomplish this; and a sphere in which it can be accomplished. The power that we thus postulate is God, and the sphere is the immortal life.

In this whole statement, the relation is made purely personal. We have the individual requiring to be assured that his virtue will be crowned with happiness. This is not, indeed, because he demands a reward; but because virtue would necessarily be regarded as a phantom of the brain, unless there were united with it that happiness which we recognize as its necessary result. “Therefore, everyone regards the moral laws as commands; which they could not be, if they did not connect with their requirements results having an a priori adaptation to them, and thus if they did not bring with themselves promises and threats.”^[6] It is thus obvious that what was here in the mind of Kant was something of the nature of rewards and punishments. God is regarded as the power that represents the moral law, and applies its sanctions. These sanctions must not be supposed to be arbitrarily affixed to the law; they are bound up with the very idea of it. On the other hand, the law is not self-executing. It is not sufficient even to secure obedience, unless these rewards and punishments are associated with it. Perhaps we might say that the meaning is, that the law could not secure allegiance unless it could show that it is actually supreme in the universe. Still it must be remembered that, as before remarked, the question, “What shall I hope?” is here supreme; and the rewards and threatenings have to do with the well being of the individual himself.

Later, he treats the same subject more fully in his “Critique of the Practical Reason.”^[7] The general view in this later exposition is the same as that in the earlier; except that here the personal element is kept much more in the background. Kant evidently feels the delicacy of the position more keenly than he did before. He sees that anything like threatenings and rewards is wholly out of place in his system of morality, which demands the right for the sake of the right alone.

In the later treatment, the postulates of immortality and the being of God are separated, each being put upon an independent footing. Immortality is postulated, not that obedience to the moral law shall be rewarded; but in order that this law itself shall have free scope; not for the sake of happiness, but for the sake of virtue. The moral law, Kant tells us in effect, is infinite. At no moment can the perfect holiness which it requires be attained. Eternity, therefore, must be postulated if the moral law is to be obeyed. An eternal progress is the only form under which obedience to it can be possible.

It might appear doubtful, at first sight, whether we have here a contradiction or a difference of emphasis. I am inclined to think, however, that, in this case, a difference of emphasis is a contradiction. Each view is given in its place as the explanation and ground of the postulate. Either of these views may furnish the basis for belief in immortality; or both of them, taken in relation to one another, may do this; but it is impossible that each of them should independently, and at the same time, furnish this basis.

The thought of the necessary apportionment of happiness to desert, which in the earlier treatment is made the occasion of postulating both God and immortality, is, in the later statement, made to furnish the ground for postulating the existence of God alone. But even here, the point of view is essentially changed. Before, the thought of personal happiness was prominent, if, indeed, the thought of the happiness of others entered at all into the discussion. The question was squarely asked: If I so conduct as to be not unworthy of happiness, shall I obtain happiness? In the later treatment, the proportioning of happiness to desert is made the general end toward which a moral being must work. The accomplishing of the result is, however, far beyond the powers of any finite being. We must postulate, then, the existence of an infinite Being, by whom the result aimed at shall be accomplished. My happiness, should I deserve happiness, is indeed bound up with the general happiness. It is an item in the mass. It is not, however, this fact that determines my activity. I am working for a general result, to which this is only incidental.

It will be noticed that we have, in this second statement, two complemental postulates, one of which insists upon what is needed by the individual in order that obedience to the law shall be possible to him, while the other refers to the difficulty of accomplishment that is inherent in the law itself. I must have scope for that infinite progress by which alone my obedience is possible; and there must also be a power that shall make possible the result which the law demands. The personal element which in the earlier statement was supreme, is in this later statement hardly appreciable.

This change in the position of Kant is interesting as illustrating the fact that Kant was seeking reasons to justify his postulates rather than basing his postulates on principles that were seen to demand them. The statement that the hope of individual happiness is essential to virtue, is thrown aside, but the result that had been based on this, remains, and another foundation is sought for it. The most general statement of the principle, it is true, remains; namely, that we are saved by hope. In the one case, however, the hope is personal; in the other, it is impersonal. This shows simply that Kant was, from the first, confident that the relation between morality and religion is a necessary one.

All this has been dwelt upon to illustrate the fact that Kant in all this matter left problems to be solved. The relation to one another of all the elements that enter into the discussion, as it is left by him, is arbitrary and superficial. The relation of God to the moral law is wholly external. God is assumed merely as the arbiter of destiny. The relation of the moral law to human nature, and thus to human freedom, is unexplained. Further, it is assumed, as a matter too obvious to require discussion, that it is impossible for any finite being to attain to perfect holiness. No ground is given for this assumption. Finally, the relation of holiness to happiness is left entirely obscure. The two stand over against one another, as elements wholly foreign, to be united only by some external power.

All the problems here suggested are made the objects of careful study by Fichte, and a clear perception of them will be found to be a great help in the comprehension of the deeper thought of his system. From the very first, he evidently felt that much was to be done in the way of filling out the system of Kant at the points here indicated. In his earliest contribution to the Kantian philosophy, the work that was written while he was the most closely under the personal influence of Kant and which was published in a certain sense under Kant’s patronage, he attacks some of these problems. He attempts to fill out, by the delicate tracery in which he was skilled, some of the gaps left by the massive masonry of Kant. He here attempts to show some relation between morality and happiness. He shows a profound view of this relationship even by a change in the term employed. He speaks of blessedness rather than of happiness. Thus, at the very beginning of his philosophic career, he is already busied by considering the “Way to the Blessed Life.” He also endeavors to represent the various relations in which God may be supposed to stand to the moral law. All of this treatment is, when compared with Fichte’s later work, entirely superficial. It illustrates, however, the fundamental nature of his interest in philosophy, by showing the nature of the problems that first forced themselves upon him. Even while he was busied with more superficial matters, while he was working out the first presentation of his system, the short statement in regard to the Worth of Man shows that these more profound problems were those toward which his speculation was really pressing, and it is these that furnish the substance of his later thought.

IV. Unity in General.

We have seen that Kant, in each of the spheres of thought, leaves certain elements not incorporated into the unity of a system. The Thing-in-itself stands outside, with no apparent relation to any part of his philosophy. The Categories and all forms of intellectual activity are accepted without being made to appear to have any organic relation to one another. The elements that enter into the higher moral life stand also disconnected. Each of these spheres thus lacks unity. Still more glaring does this lack of unity become, when we attempt to combine these various spheres into any absolute relation. The moral world and the intellectual world stand over against one another as though they belong to different universes.

The fact as last stated was obvious to Kant himself. In his introduction to the “Critique of the Faculty of Judgment,” Kant recognizes these distinct realms. One is theoretical; the other is practical. One has for its governing principle the Understanding; the other, the Reason. He recognizes the fact that here is opened an unbounded, but also an inaccessible field for knowledge. The two realms stand over against each other as if they were so many different worlds. The one is the world of the sensuous, or the natural; the other is the world of the supersensuous or the supernatural. Of these, the first can have no influence upon the second; the second, however, should have an influence upon the first. The idea of moral freedom should make the end toward which the practical reason points, actual in the world of the senses. In this case, it must be possible to regard nature in such a way that its laws are fitted to cooperate with those of moral freedom, and to work for the same end. There must, therefore, be a principle of unity by which the natural and supernatural are made one. The supersensuous principle which underlies nature, and the supersensuous principle which underlies the realm of freedom must have some common ground. This common ground cannot be reached either by the understanding or the reason, but it must make possible a passage from the one realm of thought to the other.

Fichte refers to this passage as the most significant part of this very significant book.^[8] In examining it and the principles to which it refers, he insists that in Kant’s system there are three absolutes. The first of these is the sensuous experience, which includes the whole sensuous world, so far as this is recognized by Kant. This is the realm of the understanding. The second absolute is the moral world, the world of the reason. The third is the principle which Kant recognizes as the common ground of both. Though it is the common ground, yet it cannot be seen as such; we cannot bring into a single thought the two absolutes first named as springing from it. If I am to recognize it at all, I must recognize it as a third absolute.

Fichte states expressly that the statement of Kant which we are here considering was the historical point from which his own independent speculation started. This statement by Fichte is a very important contribution to our knowledge of the development of his system. We might have assumed the fact to be as he asserts it; but it is none the less interesting to find him consciously recognizing this definite relation to the system of Kant, pointing us to the very sentence that roused his intellectual activity to its real work. This statement of Fichte furnishes, as we shall see, the key to his system. It literally describes the problem which he set himself to solve. This problem is the reduction of the theoretic reason and the practical reason to a common principle. This result involves all the others that have been named. It involves, on the one side, the unity of the theoretical processes, and thus the deduction of the Categories and the rest; and, on the other, the recognition of the nature of the object of sensuous perception, the Thing-in-itself. It involves the introduction of a similar unity into the world of the practical reason, and finally it involves what is indeed, as we have seen, the gist of the problem, the reduction of the world of the Understanding and that of the Reason to a common principle.

Notes

1. Kant’s Works, Rosenkranz’ Edition, II, 196.
2. In treating of Fichte in his “History of Philosophy.”
3. Kant’s Works, Rosenkranz’ Edition, II, 209 et 784.
4. Sämmtliche Werke, I, 486. The term Transcendental, which must not be confounded with Transcendent, is here used to indicate the contradictory nature of the view described. The object is transcendental, because it is assumed as a necessity of thought; yet it is further assumed to be external. It cannot, Fichte would say, be both, and this is what makes the view ascribed to Kant so absurd.
5. Hume’s Philosophical Works, I, 16.
6. Kant’s Werke, Rosenkranz’ Edition, II, 235.
7. Kant’s Werke, Rosenkranz’ Edition, VIII, 261.
8. Nachgelassene Werke, II, 103.