had passed a great part of his life within that school. If this be taken as the idea underlying his assertion of things-in-themselves, it may be readily admitted that much of the objectionableness of that doctrine would disappear.

Kant's position in regard to the real existence of the self, and his doctrine of an independent existence of things as more than relations, do in fact form part of a tolerably coherent realistic metaphysic, which was overshadowed but never displaced in Kant's mind by his Critical idealism. This realistic groundwork has been more and more lost sight of in certain circles, as the idealistic deductions from the Kantian theory have come more and more into prominence. But when this is the case, Kant's own position is inevitably misunderstood. It is not without interest to note that the isolated passages in which Kant suggests a Leibnitian interpretation of things-in-themselves are precisely those which have been seized upon by later writers as anticipations of the Fichtian theory. This has been conclusively proved by Ueberweg,1 in regard to one of these "asides" of Kant, which occurs at the end of the section on the Paralogism of Pure Reason, and is therefore connected with the present subject. Kant is speaking of the supposed difficulty of explaining an interaction between mind and matter, between the non-spatial and the spatial. They appear to be separated, as Hamilton was fond of saying, by the whole diameter of being. But, in point of fact, Kant argues, the "transcendental object which underlies external phenomena, as well as that which underlies internal perception, is in itself neither

1 History of Philosophy, ii. 175.

matter nor a thinking being, but a to-us-unknown ground of phenomena. . . . I can very well suppose that the substance which in respect of our external sense possesses extension is in itself the subject of thought which can be consciously represented by its own inner sense. Thus that which in one aspect is called material would at the same time, in another aspect, be a thinking being—a being whose thoughts, it is true, we cannot perceive, but the signs of whose thoughts in phenomena we can perceive."

1 In first edition. Werke, iii. 694.

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42

LECTURE II.

FICHTE.

IN the philosophical development with which we are here concerned, Fichte is an important figure. As was mentioned in the previous lecture, he was the first to transform Kant's theory of knowledge into an absolute metaphysic, and in so doing he laid the cornerstone of the whole fabric of German idealism. Fichte is interesting and instructive alike in his general mode of procedure, in the difficulties he encounters, and in the admissions to which these difficulties drive him. Moreover, being immediately based upon Kant, his constructions have in some ways a closer resemblance in form to those of Neo-Kantians like Green than is the case with the later and less accessible system of Hegel.

But though building immediately upon Kant, Fichte represents a totally different type of mind. Kant is patient and analytic, Fichte is boldly synthetic; his system is essentially, as it has just been termed, a construction. It is a construction to explain the duality of sense and reason-of receptivity and spontaneity— which Kant either left standing as an ultimate fact, or simply referred to the accepted psychological opposition of mind and things. Fichte claims to present us with a metaphysical explanation of this psychological appearance. He begins by scornfully dismissing things in - themselves as in no sense a philosophical explanation. To explain sensation or "the given" by referring to the action of a thing-in-itself of which we know nothing, is to darken counsel by words without knowledge. Fichte stoutly refused to believe that Kant could ever have intended the thing-initself to be so interpreted. "Should he make such a declaration," said the impetuous philosopher, "I shall consider the 'Critique of Pure Reason' to be the offspring of the strangest chance rather than the work of a mind." When Kant soon afterwards published the declaration in question, his disappointed disciple was

driven to reflect that the Holy Spirit in Kant had thought more in accordance with truth than Kant in his individual capacity had done. To Fichte himself it was an axiom that philosophy, if it is to be philosophy at all, must be in one piece. Its explanation must be a deduction of the apparently disparate elements of existence from a single principle; to rest in an unexplained dualism means to despair of philosophy.

But if every genuine philosophy is thus a Monism of some sort, there are, Fichte proceeds, only two possible systems or types of philosophy between which we have to choose. The one of these he calls Dogmatism, a mode of thought which, when consistent with itself, most commonly takes the form of Materialism, though Spinozism is also cited as being, on a higher plane, the typical example of a rigorous Dogmatism. The system or type of thought opposed to Dogmatism Fichte calls sometimes Criticism, sometimes Idealism. The opposition of the two systems consists in this, that Dogmatism starts with the absolute or independent existence of "things," and is therefore inevitably led, in the last resort, to explain the conscious intelligence as their