e 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
fuer 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 gra