No objection can be raised to this paragraph; for the premise of our conclusion is a mere analysis of the above-stated conception of Philosophy, and from the premise the conclusion is drawn. If somebody should wish to remind us that the conception of a ground must be differently explained, we can, to be sure, not prevent him from forming another conception of it, if he so chooses; but we declare, on the strength of our good right, that we, in the above description of Philosophy, wish to have nothing else understood by that word. Hence, if it is not to be so understood, the possibility of Philosophy, as we have described it, must be altogether denied, and such a denial we have replied to in our first section.
III. The finite intelligence has nothing beyond experience; experience contains the whole substance of its thinking. The philosopher stands necessarily under the same conditions, and hence it seems impossible that he can elevate himself beyond experience.
But he can abstract; i. e. he can separate by the freedom of thinking what in experience is united. In Experience, the Thing—that which is to be determined in itself independent of our freedom, and in accordance with which our knowledge is to shape itself—and the Intelligence—which is to obtain a knowledge of it—are inseparably united. The philosopher may abstract from both, and if he does, he has abstracted from Experience and elevated himself above it. If he abstracts from the first, he retains an intelligence in itself, i. e. abstracted from its relation to experience; if he abstract from the latter, he retains the Thing in itself, i. e. abstracted from the fact that it occurs in experience; and thus retains the Intelligence in itself, or the “Thing in itself,” as the explanatory ground of Experience. The former mode of proceeding is called Idealism, the latter Dogmatism.
Only these two philosophical systems—and of that these remarks should convince everybody—are possible. According to the first system the representations, which are accompanied by the feeling of necessity, are productions of the Intelligence, which must be presupposed in their explanation; according to the latter system they are the productions of a thing in itself which must be presupposed to explain them. If anybody desired to deny this, he would have to prove that there is still another way to go beyond experience than the one by means of abstraction, or that the consciousness of experience contains more than the two components just mentioned.
Now in regard to the first, it will appear below, it is true, that what we have here called Intelligence does, indeed, occur in consciousness under another name, and hence is not altogether produced by abstraction; but it will at the same time be shown that the consciousness of it is conditioned by an abstraction, which, however, occurs naturally to mankind.
We do not at all deny that it is possible to compose a whole system from fragments of these incongruous systems, and that this illogical labor has often been undertaken; but we do deny that more than these two systems are possible in a logical course of proceeding.
IV. Between the object—(we shall call the explanatory ground of experience, which a philosophy asserts, the object of that philosophy, since it appears to be only through and for such philosophy)—between the object of Idealism and that of Dogmatism there is a remarkable distinction in regard to their relation to consciousness generally. All whereof I am conscious is called object of consciousness. There are three ways in which the object can be related to consciousness. Either it appears to have been produced by the representation, or as existing without any action of ours; and in the latter case, as either also determined in regard to its qualitativeness, or as existing merely in regard to its existence, while determinable in regard to its qualitativeness by the free intelligence.
The first relation applies merely to an imaginary object; the second merely to an object of Experience; the third applies only to an object, which we shall at once proceed to describe.
I can determine myself by freedom to think, for instance, the Thing in itself of the Dogmatists. Now if I am to abstract from the thought and look simply upon myself, I myself become the object of a particular representation. That I appear to myself as determined in precisely this manner, and none other, e. g. as thinking, and as thinking of all possible thoughts—precisely this Thing in itself, is to depend exclusively upon my own freedom of self-determination; I have made myself such a particular object out of my own free will. I have not made myself; on the contrary, I am forced to think myself in advance as determinable through this self-determination. Hence I am myself my own object, the determinateness of which, under certain conditions, depends altogether upon the intelligence, but the existence of which must always be presupposed. Now this very “I” is the object of Idealism. The object of this system does not occur actually as something real in consciousness, not as a Thing in itself—for then Idealism would cease to be what it is, and become Dogmatism—but as “I” in itself; not as an object of Experience—for it is not determined, but is exclusively determinable through my freedom, and without this determination it would be nothing, and is really not at all—but as something beyond all Experience.
The object of Dogmatism, on the contrary, belongs to the objects of the first class, which are produced solely by free Thinking. The Thing in itself is a mere invention, and has no reality at all. It does not occur in Experience, for the system of Experience is nothing else than Thinking accompanied by the feeling of necessity, and can not even be said to be anything else by the dogmatist, who, like every philosopher, has to explain its cause. True, the dogmatist wants to obtain reality for it through the necessity of thinking it as ground of all experience, and would succeed, if he could prove that experience can be, and can be explained only by means of it. But this is the very thing in dispute, and he cannot presuppose what must first be proven.