442 PHILOSOPHY manifold of perception, and to us modify the objects. Thus criticism sets insurmountable bounds to the speculative reason, and might seem to favor an absolute skepticism. But against this result Kant guards in his "Cri- tique of Practical Reason," where he begins with moral principles, and from the moral law, at- tested by conscience, conducts us to God, the source and author of the law, without whom the law could not exist. Here is the ground of the certainty of a rational faith. Jacobi objected to Kant that his philosophy destroy- ed itself by an intrinsic contradiction, since to come to the "critique" of reason, one must first have a causal nexus, uniting the thinking subject and its object. Reinhold at first found this in consciousness, but Jacobi, averse to dogmatical theories which admitted no truth without demonstration, and which led logically to determinism and pantheism, sought to avoid the difficulty by founding all philosophical knowledge on belief, which he describes as an instinct of reason. The external world is revealed to us by the senses, and things im- perceptible, as spiritual truths, by an internal sense; and by this twofold revelation man is awakened to consciousness and a sense of free will. Schleiermacher followed Kant only to a limited extent, and, as a student of Plato and Spinoza, as well as of contemporary thinkers, was rather a critic of the systems of others than the author of one of his own. His position, while not without deep philo- sophical significance, was more important in the religious sphere. Fries, following Jacobi's line of thought, developed the doctrine that the sensible is the object of knowledge, the supra-sensible the object of faith. He held also that only a posteriori, or through internal experience, can we become conscious that, and how, we possess cognitions a, priori. Fichte, adopting some of Kant's peculiar opinions, pushed to an extreme their subjective idealis- tic tendency. The Ego was made to take the place of the absolute principle. The matter of representations, as well as the form, was the result of its activity, and the manifold con- tents of experience, like the a priori forms of cognition, are produced by a creative faculty in us. The Ego posits both itself and the non- Ego, and recognizes itself as one with the lat- ter. But with these results of his speculative philosophy Fichte connects the positive con- clusions of his practical philosophy. The in- dividual is deduced from the absolute Ego, for morality demands the distinction of individ- uals; yet the rise of the limits of the indi- vidual is pronounced incomprehensible. The world is the material of duty in the forms of sense, and God is identified with the order of the world. In his later speculations Fichte, making the absolute his point of departure, approximated to the position more distinctly taken by Schelling. The latter transformed Fichte's doctrine of the Ego, accepted by him, through combination with Spinozism, into the doctrine of identity. He made subject and object, ideal and real, spirit and nature, identi- cal in the absolute. He designated as the soul of the world a vital principle residing in na- ture, and uniting all inorganic and organic existences in one complete organism. By suc- cessively incorporating into his system various elements, he developed a syncretistic doctrine approximating to mysticism. Rejecting these elements, yet in agreement with the original position of Schelling, Hegel held that it is not anything individual, not the Ego, that is the prim of all reality, but, on the contrary, some- thing universal which comprehends in it every individual, and in which the principle of dif- ference is immanent. Finite things are not simply phenomena for us, existing only in con- sciousness, but phenomena per se, having the ground of their being not in themselves, but in the universal divine idea. This idea, the absolute, is the unity of life and cognition, the universal that thinks itself, and thinkingly re- alizes itself in an infinite actuality. It reveals itself in nature and spirit, not only underly- ing both as their substance, but as rational subject returning through them, by means of a progressive development from the lowest to the highest stages, from its state of self-aliena- tion to itself. Its self-development is three- fold: 1, in the abstract element of thought; 2, in nature ; 3, in spirit following the order of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The aim of He- gel's philosophy is, first to elevate conscious- ness to the point of absolute knowledge, and then to develop the entire contents of this knowledge by means of the dialectical method. Herbart took his point of departure, not from Kant, but from Fichte, to whose subjective idealism he opposed the fundamental doctrine of the plurality of simple real essences, some- what akin to the monadological doctrine of Leibnitz. This, from its predominant character, he named realism. His logic agrees in princi- ple with Kant's. Conceptions must be modi- fied or transformed, so that they shall not con- tradict being, and this is the proper work of speculation. But this necessity requires us to admit the doctrine of a multiplicity of essen- ces. Beneke (died about 1854), opposing Hegel and Herbart, and following Kant, emphasized internal experience. His guiding thought is, that through self-consciousness we know our- selves psychically as we are, but are able only imperfectly to know the external world through the senses, its true nature being apprehensible only as we suppose analogies of our psychical life to underlie the phenomena of the world of sense. Schopenhauer (died in 1860) taught, with Kant, that space, time, and the categories have a purely subjective origin, valid only for phenomena which are merely subjective rep- resentations in consciousness. He denies, how- ever, that the real is unknowable, and finds it in will, taken in a broad sense, so that it in- cludes not only conscious desire, but also un- conscious instinct, and the forces which mani-
