%4.  From Kant to Fichte.%

To begin with the works which aided in the extension and recognition of the Kantian philosophy, besides Kant’s Prolegomena, the following stand in the front rank:  Exposition of the Critique of Pure Reason, by the Koenigsberg court preacher, Johannes Schulz, 1784; the flowing Letters concerning the Kantian Philosophy, by K.L.  Reinhold in Wieland’s Deutscher Merkur, 1786-87; and the Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung, in Jena, founded in 1785, and edited by the philologist Schuetz and the jurist Hufeland, which offered itself as the organ of the new doctrine.  Jena became the home and principal stronghold of Kantianism; while by the beginning of the nineteenth century almost all German chairs belonged to it, and the non-philosophical sciences as well received from it stimulation and guiding ideas.

In the camp of the enemy there was no less of activity.  The Wolffian, Eberhard of Halle, founded a special journal for the purpose of opposing the Kantian philosophy:  the Philosophisches Magazin, 1789, continued from 1792 as the Philosophisches Archiv.  The Illumination collected its forces in the Philosophische Bibliothek, edited by Feder and Meiners.  Nicolai waved the banner of common sense in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, and in satirical romances, and was handled as he deserved by the heroes of poetry and philosophy (cf. the Xenien of Goethe and Schiller, Kant’s Letter on Bookmaking, and Fichte’s cutting disposal of him, Nicolai’s Life and Peculiar Opinions).  The attacks of the faith-philosophers have been already noticed (pp. 310-314).

The advance from Kant to Fichte was preparing alike among friends and enemies, and this in two points.  The demand was in part for a formal complement (a first principle from which the Kantian results could be deduced, and by which the dualism of sense and understanding could be overcome), in part for material correction (the removal of the thing in itself) and development (to radical idealism).  Karl Leonhard Reinhold (born at Vienna in 1758; fled from a college of the St. Barnabite order, 1783; in 1787-94 professor in Jena, and then as the successor of Tetens in Kiel, where he died in 1823) undertook the former task in his Attempt at a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation, 1789.  Kant’s classical theory of the faculty of cognition requires for its foundation a theory of the faculty 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: