Besides the perspicuity which would have prevented these misunderstandings, Fichte misses something further in Kant’s work.  Considered as a system Kant’s expositions were incomplete; and, on his own confession, his aim was not to furnish the science itself, but only the foundation and the materials for it.  Therefore, although the Kantian philosophy is established as far as its inner content is concerned, there is still need of earnest work to systematize the fragments and results which he gives into a firmly connected and impregnable whole.  The Wissenschaftslehre takes this completion of idealism for its mission.  It cannot solve the problem by a commentary on the Kantian writings, nor by the correction and addition of particulars, but only by restoring the whole at a stroke.  He alone finds the truth who new creates it in himself, independently and in his own way.  Thus Fichte’s system contains the same view of the matter as the critical system—­the author is aware, runs the preface to the programme, On the Concept of the Science of Knowledge, 1794, “that he never will be able to say anything at which Kant has not hinted, immediately or mediately, more or less clearly, before him,”—­but in his procedure he is entirely independent of the Kantian exposition.  We shall first raise the question, What in the Kantian philosophy is in need of completion? and, secondly, What method must be adopted in completing it?

Kant discusses the laws of intelligence when they are already applied to objects, without enlightening us concerning the ground of these laws.  He derived the pure concepts (the laws of substantiality, of causality, etc.) from (logic, and thus mediately from) experience instead of deducing them from the nature of intelligence; similarly he never furnished this deduction for the forms of intuition, space and time.  In order to understand that intelligence, and why intelligence, must act in just this way (must think just by means of these categories), we must prove, and not merely, with Kant, assert, that these functions or forms are really laws of thought—­or, what amounts to the same thing, that they are conditions of self-consciousness.  Again, even if it be granted that Kant has explained the properties and relations of things (that they appear in space and time, and that their accidents must be referred to substances), the question still remains unanswered, Whence comes the matter which is taken up into these forms?  So long as the whole object is not made to arise before the eyes of the thinker, dogmatism is not driven out of its last corner.  The thing in itself is, like the rest, only a thought in the ego.  If thus the antithesis between the form and the matter of cognition undergoes modification, so, further, the allied distinction between understanding and sensibility must, as Reinhold accurately recognized, be reduced to a common principle and receptivity be conceived as self-limiting spontaneity.  In his