f thought and its object, every cognition
necessarily implies the coming together of a subjective and an objective
factor. The problem of this coming together may be treated in two ways.
With the philosophy of nature we may start from the object and observe how
intelligence is added to nature. The transcendental philosophy takes the
opposite course, it takes its position with the subject, and asks, How
is there added to intelligence an object corresponding to it? The
transcendental philosopher has need of intellectual intuition in order to
recognize the original object-positing actions of the ego, which remain
concealed from common consciousness, sunk in the outcome of these acts. The
_theoretical_ part of the system explains the representation of objective
reality (the feeling connected with certain representations that we are
compelled to have them), from pure self-consciousness, whose opposing
moments, a real and an ideal force, limit each other by degrees,--and
follows the development of spirit in three periods ("epochs"). The first
of these extends from sensation, in which the ego finds itself limited, to
productive intuition, in which a thing in itself is posited over against
the ego and the phenomenon between the two; the second, from this point to
reflection (feeling of self, outer and inner intuition together with space
and time, the categories of relation as the original categories); the
third, finally, through judgment, wherein intuition and concept are
separated as well as united, up to the absolute act of will. Willing is
the continuation and completion of intuition;[1] intuition was unconscious
production, willing is conscious production. It is only through action that
the world becomes objective for us, only through interaction with other
active intelligences that the ego attains to the consciousness of a real
external world, and to the consciousness of its freedom. The _practical_
part follows the will from impulse (the feeling of contradiction between
the ideal and the object) through the division into moral law and resistant
natural impulse up to arbitrary will. Observations on legal order, on the
state, and on history are added as "supplements." The law of right, by
which unlawful action is directed against itself, is not a moral, but a
natural order, which operates with blind necessity. The state, like law, is
a product of the genus, and not of individuals. The ideal of a cosmopolitan
legal condition is