Censure without argument tells me simply that my doctrine does not please; and this confession is again very unimportant; for the question is not at all, whether it pleases you or not, but whether it has been proven. In the present sketch I write only for those, in whom there still dwells an inner sense of love for truth; who still value science and conviction, and who are impelled by a lively zeal to seek truth. With those, who, by long spiritual slavery, have lost with the faith in their own conviction their faith in the conviction of others; who consider it folly if anybody attempts to seek truth for himself; who see nothing in science but a comfortable mode of subsistence; who are horrified at every proposition to enlarge its boundaries involving as a new labor, and who consider no means disgraceful by which they can hope to suppress him who makes such a proposition,—with those I have nothing to do.
I should be sorry if they understood me. Hitherto this wish of mine has been realized; and I hope, even now, that these present lines will so confuse them that they can perceive nothing more in them than mere words, while that which represents their mind is torn hither and thither by their ill-concealed rage.
INTRODUCTION.
I. Attend to thyself; turn thine eye away from all that surrounds thee and into thine own inner self! Such is the first task imposed upon the student by Philosophy. We speak of nothing that is without thee, but merely of thyself.
The slightest self-observation must show every one a remarkable difference between the various immediate conditions of his consciousness, which we may also call representations. For some of them appear altogether dependent upon our freedom, and we cannot possibly believe that there is without us anything corresponding to them. Our imagination, our will, appears to us as free. Others, however, we refer to a Truth as their model, which is held to be firmly fixed, independent of us; and in determining such representations, we find ourselves conditioned by the necessity of their harmony with this Truth. In the knowledge of them we do not consider ourselves free, as far as their contents are concerned. In short: while some of our representations are accompanied by the feeling of freedom, others are accompanied by the feeling of necessity.
Reasonably the question cannot arise—why are the representations dependent upon our freedom determined in precisely this manner, and not otherwise? For in supposing them to be dependent upon our freedom, all application of the conception of a ground is rejected; they are thus, because I so fashioned them, and if I had fashioned them differently, they would be otherwise.
But it is certainly a question worthy of reflection—what is the ground of the system of those representations which are accompanied by the feeling of necessity and of that feeling of necessity itself? To answer this question is the object of philosophy; and, in my opinion, nothing is philosophy but the Science which solves this problem. The system of those representations, which are accompanied by the feeling of necessity, is also called Experience—internal as well as external experience. Philosophy, therefore, to say the same thing in other words, has to find the ground of all Experience.
Only three objections can be raised against this. Somebody might deny that representations, accompanied by the feeling of necessity, and referred to a Truth determined without any action of ours, do ever occur in our consciousness. Such a person would either deny his own knowledge, or be altogether differently constructed from other men; in which latter case his denial would be of no concern to us. Or somebody might say: the question is completely unanswerable, we are in irremovable ignorance concerning it, and must remain so. To enter into argument with such a person is altogether superfluous. The best reply he can receive is an actual answer to the question, and then all he can do is to examine our answer, and tell us why and in what matters it does not appear satisfactory to him. Finally, somebody might quarrel about the designation, and assert: “Philosophy is something else than what you have stated above, or at least something else besides.” It might be easily shown to such a one, that scholars have at all times designated exactly what we have just stated to be Philosophy, and that whatever else he might assert to be Philosophy, has already another name, and that if this word signifies anything at all, it must mean exactly this Science. But as we are not inclined to enter upon any dispute about words, we, for our part, have already given up the name of Philosophy, and have called the Science which has the solution of this problem for its object, the Science of Knowledge.
II. Only when speaking of something, which we consider accidental, i. e. which we suppose might also have been otherwise, though it was not determined by freedom, can we ask for its ground; and by this very asking for its ground does it become accidental to the questioner. To find the ground of anything accidental means, to find something else, from the determinedness of which it can be seen why the accidental, amongst the various conditions it might have assumed, assumed precisely the one it did. The ground lies—by the very thinking of a ground—beyond its Grounded, and both are, in so far as they are Ground and Grounded, opposed to each other, related to each other, and thus the latter is explained from the former.
Now Philosophy is to discover the ground of all experience; hence its object lies necessarily beyond all Experience. This sentence applies to all Philosophy, and has been so applied always heretofore, if we except these latter days of Kant’s misconstruers and their facts of consciousness, i. e. of inner experience.