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 Helmstaedt, and from 1810 in Goettingen, 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 spher