[Footnote 1:  At the same time as J.H.  Loewe’s book Die Philosophie Fichtes, 1862, there appeared in celebration of the centenary of Fichte’s birthyear, or birthday, a large number of minor essays and addresses by Friedrich Harms, A.L.  Kym, Trendelenburg, Franz Hoffman, Karl Heyder, F.C.  Lott, Karl Koestlin, J.B.  Meyer, and others (cf.  Reichlin-Meldegg in vol. xlii. of the Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie).  Lasson has written, 1863, on Fichte’s relation to Church and state, Zeller on Fichte as a political thinker (Vortraege und Abhandlungen, 1865), and F. Zimmer on his philosophy of religion.  Among foreign works we may note Adamson’s Fichte, 1881, and the English translations of several of Fichte’s works by Kroeger [Science of Knowledge, 1868; Science of Rights, 1869—­both also, 1889] and William Smith [Popular Writings, 4th ed., 1889; also Everett’s Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (Griggs’s Philosophical Classics, 1884), and several translations in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, including one of The Facts of Consciousness.—­TR.]]

%1.  The Science of Knowledge.%

%(a) The Problem.%—­In Fichte’s judgment Kant did not succeed in carrying through the transformation in thought which it was his aim to effect, because the age did not understand the spirit of his philosophy.  This spirit, and with it the great service of Kant, consists in transcendental idealism, which by the doctrine that objects conform themselves to representations, not representations to objects, draws philosophy away from external objects and leads it back into ourselves.  We have followed the letter, he thinks, instead of the spirit of Kant, and because of a few passages with a dogmatic ring, whose references to a given matter, the thing in itself, and the like, were intended only as preliminary, have overlooked the numberless others in which the contrary is distinctly maintained.  Thus the interpreters of Kant, using their own prejudices as a criterion, have read into him exactly that which he sought to refute, and have made the destroyer of all dogmatism himself a dogmatist; thus in the Kantianism of the Kantians there has sprung up a marvelous combination of crude dogmatism and uncompromising idealism.  Though such an absurd mingling of entirely heterogeneous elements may be excused in the case of interpreters and successors, who have had to construct for themselves the guiding principle of the whole from their study of the critical writings, yet we cannot assume it in the author of the system, unless we believe the Critique of Pure Reason the result of the strangest chance, and not the work of intellect.  Two men only, Beck, the teacher of the Standpoint, and Jacobi, the clearest mind of the century, are to be mentioned with respect as having risen above the confusion of the time to the perception that Kant teaches idealism, that, according to him, the object is not given, but made.