[Footnote 1:  “Reason consists just in this, that we are able to give account of all our concepts, opinions, and assertions, either on objective or subjective grounds.”]

[Footnote 2:  Those who regard all future metaphysics as refuted by the Critique of Reason are to be referred to the positive side of the Kantian doctrine of Ideas.  Kant admits that the mechanical explanation does not satisfy reason, and that, besides it, a judgment according to Ideas is legitimate.  When, therefore, the speculation of the constructive school gives an ideal interpretation of the world, it may be regarded as an extended application of “regulative principles,” which exceeds its authority only when it professes to be “objective knowledge.”]

The effect of the three Critiques upon the public was very varied.  The first 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 glanced at in a few supplementary pages.