The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Rosinski - Die Wirklichkeit als Phänomen des Geistes - Part 2
Reality is given us by means of sense-perception. The self can ascribe existence to the things to which it refers the various contents of perception only in case they have become its presentations. The consciousness of independence of me is a quality of my presentation of the object; it is the characteristic idea which distinguishes this presentation from others. Being is a category, a necessary rule of thinking, by which the object first gets its objective character. If I say 'A is,' I express the objectification of A simply through the category of being; but since the categories are only functions of thinking, and so purely subjective forms of spirit, the objects get their objectivity only through us. Reality cannot have the significance of absoluteness, but must rather have that of relativity. Things must be endowed with such a nature that the laws by which they become things find application to them; they can belong only to the sphere of the laws themselves; they must therefore be pure phenomena of spirit. Neither consciousness nor its object can exist for itself; consciousness has existence only in (an) its object. If neither outer nor inner objects appear to us, our consciousness, too, must disappear. Subject and object mutually condition one another. Together they form a complex, an immanent unity subsisting by mutual dependence. Herbart's notion of an absolute positing is self-contradictory — as posited, the object would be in us, and as absolute, it would be quite apart from us. It is just as if we should say that the table is in the room and not in it at the same time. The truth of knowledge is dependent only on its agreement with the laws of the understanding. These laws fully satisfy our feeling of conviction and impulse to know. The concept is developed into the judgment by subjecting itself to the identity of the self. The equality of the concept with itself is only the objectified expression of the identity of the self. Since knowledge is possible only through categories, and that, too, only when the categories form an immanent unity with the identity of the self, and since the identity of the self involves the relativity of its object, all knowledge, and so the entire world-picture, is only subjective. This applies not only to things, but to selves. All spirits are only in my spirit — every self is only a phenomenal form of my self. The moral order of the world is a necessary form of evolution of the absolute self. In monism, to which I hold, God would be the absolute self, over against whom stand all individual selves as his phenomena. He is not an absolute-real, but an absolute-ideal essence.