CHAPTER XIX.

RELATIONS OF FICHTE'S SYSTEM TO THE DOCTRINES OF KANT.

144. I have already shown[64] how Kant's system leads to Fichte's. When a dangerous principle is established, there is never wanting an author bold enough to deduce its consequences, whatever they may be. The author of the _Doctrine of Science_, led astray by the doctrines of Kant, establishes the most extravagant pantheism that was ever invented. In concluding his work, he says that he leaves the reader at the point where Kant takes him; he ought rather to have said that he takes the reader at the point where Kant leaves him. The author of the _Critic of Pure Reason_, by converting space into a purely subjective fact, destroys the reality of extension, and opens the door to those who wish to deduce all nature from the _me_; and by making time a simple form of the internal sense, he causes the succession of phenomena in time to be considered as mere modifications of the _me_ to the form of which they relate.

[64] See Bk. III., Ch. XVII.

145. But it is far from being necessary for us to hunt after deductions; the philosopher himself, in the midst of his obscurity and enigmatical language, does not cease to lay down in the most precise manner this monstrous doctrine. Let us hear how he speaks in his transcendental Logic, where he proposes to explain the relation of the understanding to objects in general, and the possibility of knowing them _a priori_. "The order and regularity in phenomena, that which we call nature, _is consequently our own work_; we should not find it there if we had not placed it there by the nature of our mind; for this natural unity must be a necessary unity, that is to say, a certain unity _a priori_ of the connection of the phenomena. But how could we produce a synthetic unity _a priori_, if there were not in the primitive sources of our mind subjective reasons of this unity _a priori_, and if these subjective conditions were not at the same time _objectively valid_, since they are the grounds of the possibility of knowing in general an object in experience?"[65] Who does not see in these words the germ of Fichte's system, which deduces from the _me_ the _not-me_, that is to say, the world, and gives to nature no other validity than that which it has received from the _me_?

[65] Kant, _Critik der reinen Vernunft, Trause. Log._

146. But Kant is still more explicit, where he is explaining the nature and attributes of the understanding. He says: "We have before defined the understanding in different ways; we have called it a spontaneity of knowledge, (in opposition to the receptivity of sensibility,) a faculty of thought, or rather, a faculty of conceptions or judgments; these definitions, rightly explained, are but one. We may now characterize it as a _faculty of rules_. This character is more fruitful, and comes nearer to the essence of the thing: sensibility gives us forms (of intuition) and the understanding rules. The latter is always applied to the observation of phenomena in order to find in them some rule. The rules, if objective, (if, consequently, necessarily united to the knowledge of the object,) are called laws. Although we know many laws by experience, still these laws are only particular determinations of other higher laws, the highest of which (to which all the others are subjected) _proceed_ a priori _from the understanding itself_, and are not taken from experience, but, on the contrary, they give to the phenomena their validity, and therefore make experience possible. The understanding, then, is not simply a faculty of making rules for itself, and comparing phenomena; _it is also the legislation for nature; that is to say, that without the understanding there would be no nature_, or synthetic unity of the multiplicity of phenomena according to certain rules. For the phenomena, as such, cannot exist out of us; on the contrary, they only exist in our sensibility; but this, as the object of the knowledge in an experience, with all that it can contain, is only possible in the unity of the apperception. The unity of the apperception is the transcendental foundation of the necessary legitimacy of all the phenomena in an experience; this unity of the apperception in relation to the multiplicity of the representations (in order to determine the multiplicity by starting from only one) is the rule, and the faculty of these rules is the understanding. All phenomena, then, as possible experiences, are _a priori_ in the understanding, and from it they derive their formal possibility, in the same manner that they are pure intuitions in the sensibility, and are only possible by it in relation to the form."

In the _deduction of the pure conceptions of the understanding_, Kant not only pretends that the objects of our knowledge are not things in themselves, but that it is impossible that they should be, because we could not then have conceptions _a priori_. He adds, that the representation of all these phenomena, consequently all objects which we know, are all in the _me_, and are determinations of _my identical me_, which expresses the necessity of a universal unity of these determinations in only one and the same apperception.

147. From these passages it clearly follows that Fichte's system, or the ideal pantheism which reduces every thing to modifications of the _me_, accords with the principles established in the _Critic of Pure Reason_, and is even expressly laid down, although it does not form its principal object in that work. For the sake of impartiality I cannot do less than refer the reader to the seventeenth chapter of the third book, where I have intimated that the German philosopher attempts to explain his expressions so as to escape idealism, which he professes to refute. But this he seems to me to do only by an inconsequence.

148. However, my opinion of the connection of modern pantheism with the _Critik der reinen Vernunft_ is confirmed even by the Germans. "From these depths," says Rosenkranz, speaking of this work, "the results of the transcendental æsthetics and logic receive a new importance in the great problems of theology, cosmology, morals, and psychology, which was not even suspected by the dull sense of the greater part of its admirers. They know nothing of the chain which unites Fichte's _Doctrine of Science_, Schelling's _System of Transcendental Idealism_, Hegel's _Phenomenology and Logic_, and Herbart's _Metaphysics_, with Kant's _Critic_....

"I may say that the English and French in particular will understand nothing of the development of German philosophy since Kant, until they have penetrated the _Critic of Pure Reason_, for _we Germans always look to that_.... Just as we use the houses, the palaces, the churches, but most of all the towers which rise over every thing to guide us in a large city; so also in contemporary philosophy, amid the labyrinth of its quarrels it is impossible to take a single step with security unless we keep our sight fixed on Kant's _Critic_. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Herbart made this work the great centre of their operations for attack or defence."[66]

[66] Preface of the edition of Leipsic, 1838.

149. I do not mean by this that the German philosophers since Kant have added nothing to the _Critic of Pure Reason_: I have already observed (in the seventh chapter of the first book) that the cause of the greater obscurity which is found in Fichte's words, proceeds from his having gone farther than Kant in his abstraction of all objectiveness both external and internal, placing himself in I know not what pure primitive act, from which he pretends to deduce every thing; in which he differs from the author of the _Critic of Pure Reason_, whose labors did not so absolutely annihilate the objectiveness of the internal world, and therefore his observations are less incomprehensible, and even present here and there some few luminous points: I only wished to show the baneful importance of Kant's works, to place those incautious persons on their guard, who, judging from what they have heard, are inclined to regard him as the great restorer of spiritualism and sound philosophy, when, in reality, he is the founder of the most pernicious schools which the history of the human mind has known, and would be one of the most dangerous writers that ever existed, were it not that the obscurity of his ideas, increased by the obscurity of their expression, renders him intolerable to the immense majority of readers, even of those versed in philosophical studies.