Fries adopts and popularizes Kant’s results, while he rejects Kant’s method.  With Reinhold and Fichte, he thinks “transcendental prejudice” has forced its way into philosophy, a phase of thought for which Kant himself was responsible by his anxiety to demonstrate everything.  That a priori forms of knowledge exist cannot be proved by speculation, but only by empirical methods, and discovered by inner observation; they are given facts of reason, of which we become conscious by reflection or psychological analysis.  The a priori element cannot be demonstrated nor deduced, but only shown actually present.  The question at issue[1] between Fries and the idealistic school therefore becomes, Is the discovery of the a priori element itself a cognition a priori or a posteriori?  Is the criticism of reason a metaphysical or an empirical, that is, an anthropological inquiry?  Herbart decides with the idealists:  “All concepts through which we think our faculty of knowledge are themselves metaphysical concepts” (Lehrbuch zur Einleitung, p. 231).  Fries decides:  The criticism of reason is an empirico-psychological inquiry, as in general empirical psychology forms the basis of all philosophy.

[Footnote 1:  Cf.  Kuno Fischer’s Pro-Rectoral Address, Die beiden Kantischen Schulen in Jena, 1862.]

With the exception of this divergence in method Fries accepts Kant’s results almost unchanged, unless we must call the leveling down which they suffer at his hands a considerable alteration.  Only the doctrine of the Ideas and of the knowledge of reason is transformed by the introduction and systematization of Jacobi’s principle of the immediate evidence of faith.  Reason, the faculty of Ideas, i.e., of the indemonstrable yet indubitable principles, is fully the peer of the sensibility and the understanding.  The same subjective necessity which guarantees to us the objective reality of the intuitions and the categories accompanies the Ideas as well; the faith which reveals to us the per se of things is no less certain than the knowledge of phenomena.  The ideal view of the world is just as necessary as the natural view; through the former we cognize the same world as through the latter, only after a higher order; both spring from reason or the unity of transcendental apperception, only that in the natural view we are conscious of the fact, from which we abstract in the ideal view, that this is the condition of experience.  That which necessitates us to rise from knowledge to faith is the circumstance that the empty unity-form of reason is never completely filled by sensuous cognition.  The Ideas are of two kinds:  the aesthetic Ideas are intuitions, which lack clear concepts corresponding to them; the logical Ideas are concepts under which no correspondent definite intuitions can be subsumed.  The former are reached through combination; the latter by negation, by thinking away the limitations of empirical