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 sphere 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.