cognition, by removing the limits from the concepts of the understanding.  By way of the negation of all limitations we reach as many Ideas as there are categories, that is, twelve, among which the Ideas of relation are the most important.  These are the three axioms of faith—­the eternity of the soul (its elevation above space and time, to be carefully distinguished from immortality, or its permanence in time), the freedom of the will, and the Deity.  Every Idea expresses something absolute, unconditioned, perfect, and eternal.—­The dualism of knowledge and faith, of nature and freedom, or of phenomenal reality and true, higher reality, is bridged over by a third and intermediate mode of apprehension, feeling or presentiment, which teaches us the reconciliation of the two realities, the union of the Idea and the phenomenon, the interpenetration of the eternal and the temporal.  The beautiful is the Idea as it manifests itself in the phenomenon, or the phenomenon as it symbolizes the eternal.  The aesthetico-religious judgment looks on the finite as the revelation and symbol of the infinite.  In brief, “Of phenomena we have knowledge; in the true nature of things we believe; presentiment enables us to cognize the latter in the former.”

Theoretical philosophy is divided into the philosophy of nature, which is to use the mathematical method, hence to give a purely mechanical explanation of all external phenomena, including those of organic life, and to leave the consideration of the world as a teleological realm to religious presentiment—­and psychology.  The object of the former is external nature, that of the latter internal nature.  I know myself only as phenomenon, my body through outer, my ego through inner, experience.  It is only a variant mode of appearing on the part of one and the same reality—­so Fries remarks in opposition to the influxus physicus and the harmonia praestabilata—­which now shows me my person inwardly as my spirit, and now outwardly as the life-process of my body.  Practical philosophy includes ethics, the philosophy of religion, and aesthetics.  In accordance with the threefold interest of our animal, sensuo-rational, and purely rational impulses, there result three ideals for the legislation of values.  These are the ideal of happiness, the ideal of perfection, and the ideal of morality, or of the agreeable, the useful, and the good, the third of which alone possesses an unconditioned worth and validity as a universal and necessary law.  The moral laws are deduced from faith in the equal personal dignity of men, and the ennobling of humanity set up as the highest mission of morality.  The three fundamental aesthetical tempers are the idyllic and epic of enthusiasm, the dramatic of resignation, the lyric of devotion.