irst 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