[Footnote 1: The universal laws springing from the understanding, to which every nature must conform to become an object of experience for us, determine nothing concerning the particular form of the given reality; we cannot deduce the special laws of nature from them. Nevertheless the nature of our cognitive faculty does not allow us to accept the empirical manifoldness of our world as contingent, but impels us to regard it as purposive or adapted to our knowledge, and to look upon these special laws as if an intelligence had given them in order to make a system of experience possible.]

This, in turn, is of two kinds. An object is really or objectively purposive (perfect) when it corresponds to its nature or its determination, formally or subjectively purposive (beautiful) when it is conformed to the nature of our cognitive faculty. The perception of purpose is always accompanied by a feeling of pleasure; in the first case, where the pleasure is based on a concept of the object, it is a logical satisfaction, in the second, where it springs only from the harmony of the object with our cognitive powers, aesthetic satisfaction. The objects of the teleological and the aesthetic judgment, the purposive and the beautiful products of nature and art, constitute the desired intermediate field between nature and freedom; and here again the critical question comes up, How, in relation to these, synthetic judgments a priori are possible?

%(a) Esthetic Judgment.%—The formula holds of Kant's aesthetics as well as of his theoretical and practical philosophy, that his aim is to overcome the opposition between the empirical and the rationalistic theories, and to find a middle course of his own between the two extremes. Neither Burke nor Baumgarten satisfied him. The English aesthetics was sensational, the German, i.e., that of the Wolffian school, rationalistic. The former identified the beautiful with the agreeable, the latter identified it with the perfect or with the conformity of the object to its concept; in the one case, aesthetic appreciation is treated as sensuous pleasure, in the other, it is treated as a lower, confused kind of knowledge, its peculiar nature being in both cases overlooked. In opposition to the sensualization of aesthetic appreciation, its character as judgment must be maintained; and in opposition to its rationalization, its character as feeling. This relation of the Kantian aesthetics to that of his predecessors explains both its fundamental tendency and the elements in it which appear defective and erroneous. In any case, Kant shows himself in this field also an unapproachable master of careful analysis.

The first task of aesthetics is the careful distinction of its object from related phenomena. The beautiful has points of contact with the agreeable, the good, the perfect, the useful, and the true. It is distinguished from the true by the fact that it is not an object of knowledge, but of satisfaction. If we inquire further into the difference between the satisfaction in the beautiful and the satisfaction in the agreeable, in the good (in itself), and in the (good for something, as a means, or in the) useful, which latter three have this in common, that they are objects of appetition—of sensuous want, of moral will, of prudential desire—it becomes evident that the beautiful pleases through its mere representation (that is, independently of the real existence of the object), and that the delight in the beautiful is a contemplative pleasure. It is for contemplation only, not to be sensuously enjoyed nor put to practical use; and, further, its production is not a universal duty. Sensuous, prudential, or moral appetition has always an "interest" in the actual existence of the object; the beautiful, on the other hand, calls forth a disinterested satisfaction.

According to quality the beautiful is the object of a disinterested, free (bound by no interest), and sportive satisfaction. According to quantity and modality the judgment of taste claims universal and necessary validity, without this being based upon concepts. This posits further differences between the beautiful and the agreeable and the good. The good also pleases universally, but it pleases through concepts; the agreeable as well as the beautiful pleases without a concept, but it does not please universally.

That which pleases the reason through the concept is good; that which pleases the senses in sensation is agreeable. That which pleases universally and necessarily without a concept is beautiful. Moral judgment demands the assent of all, and its universal validity is demonstrable. The judgment concerning the agreeable is not capable of demonstration, but neither does it pretend to possess universal validity; we readily acknowledge that what is pleasant to one need not be so to every other man. In regard to the beautiful, on the contrary, we do not content ourselves with saying that tastes differ, but we expect it to please all. We expect everyone to assent to our judgment of taste, although it is able to support itself by no proofs.

Here there is a difficulty: since the judgment of taste does not express a characteristic of the object, but a state of mind in the observer, a feeling, a satisfaction, it is purely subjective; and yet it puts forth a claim to be universally communicable. The difficulty can be removed only on the assumption of a common aesthetic sense, of a corresponding organization of the powers of representation in all men, which yields the common standard for the pleasurableness of the impression. The agreeable appeals to that in man which is different in different individuals, the beautiful to that which functions alike in all; the former addresses itself to the passive sensibility, the latter to the active judgment. The agreeable—because of the non-calculable differences in our sensuous inclinations, which are in part conditioned by bodily states—possesses no universality whatever, the good possesses an objective, and the beautiful a subjective universality. The judgment concerning the agreeable has an empirical, that concerning the beautiful an a priori, determining ground: in the former case, the judgment follows the feeling, in the latter, it precedes it.

An object is considered beautiful (for, strictly speaking, we may say only this, not that it is beautiful) when its form puts the powers of the human mind in a state of harmony, brings the intuitive and rational faculties into concordant activity, and produces an agreeable proportion between the imagination and the understanding. In giving the occasion for an harmonious play of the cognitive activities (that is, for an easy combination of the manifold into unity) the beautiful object is purposive for us, for our function of apprehension; it is—here we obtain a determination of the judgment of taste from the standpoint of relation—purposive without a definite purpose. We know perfectly well that a landscape which attracts us has not been specially arranged for the purpose of delighting us, and we do not wish to find in a work of art anything of an intention to please. An object is perfect when it is purposive for itself (corresponds to its concept); useful when it is purposive for our desire (corresponds to a practical intention of man); beautiful when the arrangement of its parts is purposive for the relation between the fancy and understanding of the beholder (corresponds in an unusual degree to the conditions of our apprehension). Perfection is internal (real, objective) purposiveness, and utility is external purposiveness, both for a definite purpose; beauty, on the other hand, is purposiveness without a purpose, formal, subjective purposiveness. The beautiful pleases by its mere form. The satisfaction in the perfect is of a conceptual or intellectual kind, the satisfaction in the beautiful, emotional or aesthetic in character.

The combination of these four determinations yields an exhaustive definition of the beautiful: The beautiful is that which universally and necessarily arouses disinterested satisfaction by its mere form (purposiveness without the representation of a purpose).

Since the pleasurableness of the beautiful rests on the fact that it establishes a pleasing harmony between the imagination and the understanding, hence between sensuous and intellectual apprehension, the aesthetic attitude is possible only in sensuous-rational beings. The agreeable exists for the animal as well, and the good is an object of approval for pure spirits; but the beautiful exists for humanity alone. Kant succeeded in giving very delicate and felicitous verbal expression to these distinctions: the agreeable gratifies (vergnügt) and excites inclination (Neigung); the good is approved (gebilligt) and arouses respect (Achtung); the beautiful "pleases" (gefällt) and finds "favor" (Gunst).

In the progress of the investigation the principle that beauty depends on the form alone, and that the concept, the purpose, the nature of the object is not taken into account at all in aesthetic judgment, experiences limitation. In its full strictness this applies only to a definite and, in fact, a subordinate division of the beautiful, which Kant marks off under the name of pure or free beauty. With this he contrasts adherent beauty, as that which presupposes a generic concept to which its form must correspond and which it must adequately present. Too much a purist not to mark the coming in of an intellectual pleasure as a beclouding of the "purity" of the aesthetic satisfaction, he is still just enough to admit the higher worth of adherent beauty. For almost the whole of artificial beauty and a considerable part of natural beauty belong to this latter division, which we to-day term ideal and characteristic beauty. Examples of free or purely formal beauty are tapestry patterns, arabesques, fountains, flowers, and landscapes, the pleasurableness of which rests simply on the proportion of their form and relations, and not upon their conformity to a presupposed significance and determination of the thing. A building, on the contrary—a dwelling, a summer-house, a temple—is considered beautiful only when we perceive in it not merely harmonious relations of the parts one to another, but also an agreement between the form and the purpose or generic concept: a church must not look like a chalet. Here the external form is compared with an inner nature, and harmony is required between form and content. Adherent beauty is significant and expressive beauty, which, although the satisfaction in it is not "purely" aesthetic, nevertheless stands higher than pure beauty, because it gives to the understanding also something to think, and hence busies the whole spirit.

The analytical investigations concerning the nature of the beautiful receive a valuable supplement in the classical definition of genius. Kant gives two definitions of productive talent, one formal and one genetic.

Natural beauty is a beautiful thing; artificial beauty, a beautiful representation of a thing. The gift of agreeably presenting a thing which in itself, perhaps, is ugly, is called taste. To judge of the beautiful it is sufficient to possess taste, but for its production there is still another talent needed, spirit or genius. For an art product can fulfill the demands of taste and yet not aesthetically satisfy; while formally faultless, it may be spiritless.

While beautiful nature looks as though it were art (as though it were calculated for our enjoyment), beautiful art should resemble nature, must not appear to be intentional though, no doubt, it is so, must show a careful but not an overnice adherence to rules (i.e., not one which fetters the powers of the artist). This is the case when the artist bears the rule in himself, that is, when he is gifted. Genius is the innate disposition (through) which (nature) gives rules to art; its characteristics are originality, exemplariness, and unreflectiveness. It does not produce according to definite rules which can be learned, but it is a law in itself, it is original. It creates instinctively without consciousness of the rule, and cannot describe how it produces its results. It creates typical works which impel others to follow, not to imitate. It is only in art that there are geniuses, i.e., spirits who produce that which absolutely cannot be learned, while the great men of science differ only in degree, not in kind, from their imitators and pupils, and that which they discover can be learned by rule.

This establishes the criteria by which genius may be recognized. If we ask by what psychological factors it is produced the answer is as follows: Genius presupposes a certain favorable relation between imagination and reason. Genius is the faculty of aesthetic Ideas, but an aesthetic Idea is a representation of the imagination which animates the mind, which adds to a concept of the understanding much of ineffable thought, much that belongs to the concept but which cannot be comprehended in a definite concept. With the aid of this idea Kant solves the antinomy of the aesthetic judgment. The thesis is: The judgment of taste is not based upon concepts; for otherwise it would admit of controversy (would be determinable by proofs). The antithesis is: It is based upon concepts; for otherwise we could not contend about it (endeavor to obtain assent). The two principles are reconcilable, for "concept" is understood differently in the two cases. That which the thesis rightly seeks to exclude from the judgment of beauty is the determinate concept of the understanding; that which the antithesis with equal justice pronounces indispensable is the indeterminate concept, the aesthetic Idea.

The freest play is afforded the imagination by poetry, the highest of all arts, which, with rhetoric ("insidious," on account of its earnest intention to deceive), forms the group termed arts of speech. To the class of formative arts belong architecture, sculpture, and painting as the art of design. A third group, the art of the beautiful play of sensations, includes painting as the art of color, and music, which as a "fine" art is placed immediately after poetry, as an "agreeable" art at the very foot of the list, and as the play of tone in the vicinity of the entertaining play of fortune [games of chance] and the witty play of thought. The explanation of the comic (the ludicrous is based, according to Kant, on a sudden transformation of strained expectation into nothing) lays great (indeed exaggerated) weight on the resulting physiological phenomena, the bodily shock which heightens vital feeling and favors health, and which accompanies the alternating tension and relaxation of the mind.

Besides free and adherent beauty, there is still a third kind of aesthetic effect, the Sublime. The beautiful pleases by its bounded form. But also the boundless and formless can exert aesthetic effect: that which is great beyond all comparison we judge sublime. Now this magnitude is either extensive in space and time or intensive greatness of force or power; accordingly there are two forms of the sublime. That phenomenon which mocks the power of comprehension possessed by the human imagination or surpasses every measure of our intuition, as the ocean and the starry heavens, is mathematically sublime. That which overcomes all conceivable resistance, as the terrible forces of nature, conflagrations, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, thunderstorms, is dynamically sublime or mighty. The former is relative to the cognitive, the latter to the appetitive faculty. The beautiful brings the imagination and the understanding into accord; by the sublime the fancy is brought into a certain favorable relation, not directly to be termed harmony, with reason. In the one case there arose a restful, positively pleasurable mood; here a shock is produced, an indirect and negative pleasure proceeding from pain. Since the sublime exceeds the functional capability of our sensuous representations and does violence to the imagination, we first feel small at the sight of the absolutely great, and incapable of compassing it with our sensuous glance. The sensibility is not equal to the impression; this at first seems contrary to purpose and violent. This humiliating impression, however, is quickly followed by a reaction, and the vital forces, which were at first checked, are stimulated to the more lively activity. Moreover, it is the sensuous part of man which is humbled and the spiritual part that is exalted: the overthrow of sensibility becomes a triumph for reason. The sight of the sublime, that is, awakens the Idea of the unconditioned, of the infinite. This Idea can never be adequately presented by an intuition, but can be aroused only by the inadequacy of all that is sensuous to present it; the infinite is presented through the impossibility of presenting it. We cannot intuit the infinite, but we can think it. In comparison with reason (as the faculty of Ideas, the faculty of thinking the infinite) even the greatest thing that can be given in the sense-world appears small; reason is the absolutely great. "That is sublime the mere ability to think which proves a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense." "That is sublime which pleases immediately through its opposition to the interest of the senses." The conflict between phantasy and reason, the insufficiency of the former for the attainment of the rational Idea, makes us conscious of the superiority of reason. Just because we feel small as sensuous beings we feel great as rational beings. The pleasure (related to the moral feeling of respect and, like this, mingled with a certain pain) which accompanies this consciousness of inner greatness is explained by the fact that the imagination, in acknowledging reason superior, places itself in the appropriate and purposive relation of subordination. It is evident from the foregoing that the truly sublime is reason, the moral nature of man, his predisposition and destination, which point beyond the present world. Schiller declares that "in space the sublime does not dwell," and Kant says, "Sublimity is contained in none of the things of nature, but only in our mind, in so far as we are conscious of being superior to nature within us and without us." Nevertheless, since in this contemplation we fix our thoughts entirely on the object without reflecting on ourselves, we transfer the admiration of right due to the reason and its Idea of the infinite by subreption to the object by which the Idea is occasioned, and call the object itself sublime, instead of the mood which it wakes in us.

If the sublime marks the point where the aesthetic touches on the boundary of the moral, the beautiful is also not without some relation to the good. By showing the agreement of sensibility and reason, which is demanded by the moral law, realized in aesthetic intuition (as a voluntary yielding of the imagination to the legitimacy of the understanding), it gives us the inspiring consciousness that the antithesis is reconcilable, that the rational can be presented in the sensuous, and so becomes a "symbol of the good."

%(b) Teleological Judgment.%—Teleological judgment is not knowledge, but a way of looking at things which comes into play where the causal or mechanical explanation fails us. This is not the case if the purposiveness is external, relative to its utility for something else. The fact that the sand of the sea-shore furnishes a good soil for the pine neither furthers nor prevents a causal knowledge of it. Only inner purposiveness, as it is manifested in the products of organic nature, brings the mechanical explanation to a halt. Organisms are distinguished above inorganic forms by the fact that of themselves they are at once cause and effect, that they are self-productive and this both as a species (the oak springs from the acorn, and in its turn bears acorns) and as individuals (self-preservation, growth, and the replacement of dying parts by new ones), and also by the fact that the reciprocally productive parts are in their form and their existence all conditioned by the whole. This latter fact, that the whole is the determining ground for the parts, is perfectly obvious in the products of human art. For here it is the representation of the whole (the idea of the work desired) which as the ground precedes the existence and the form of the parts (of the machine). But where is the subject to construct organisms according to its representations of ends? We may neither conceive nature itself as endowed with forces acting in view of ends, nor a praetermundane intelligence interfering in the course of nature. Either of these suppositions would be the death of natural philosophy: the hylozoist endows matter with a property which conflicts with its nature, and the theist oversteps the boundary of possible experience. Above all, the analogy of the products of organic nature with the products of human technique is destroyed by the fact that machines do not reproduce themselves and their parts cannot produce one another, while the organism organizes itself.

For our discursive understanding an interaction between the whole and the parts is completely incomprehensible. We understand when the parts precede the whole (mechanically) or the representation of the whole precedes the parts (teleologically); but to think the whole itself (not the Idea thereof) as the ground of the parts, which is demanded by organic life, is impossible for us. It would have been otherwise if an intuitive understanding had been bestowed upon us. For a being possessing intellectual intuition the antithesis between possibility and actuality, between necessity and contingency, between mechanism and teleology, would disappear along with that between thought and intuition. For such a being everything possible (all that it thinks) would be at the same time actual (present for intuition), and all that appears to us contingent—intentionally selected from several possibilities and in order to an end—would be necessary as well; with the whole would be given the parts corresponding thereto, and consequently natural mechanism and purposive connection would be identical, while for us, to whom the intuitive understanding is denied, the two divide. Hence the teleological view is a mere form of human representation, a subjective principle. We may not say that a mechanical origin of living beings is impossible, but only that we are unable to understand it. If we knew how a blade of grass or a frog sprang from mechanical forces, we would also be in a position to produce them.

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.]