OF REALITY. 449 



ing, which for a long time became characteristic of 

 German philosophy. 



Kant's analysis, though it called itself transcendental, 

 moved nevertheless almost entirely within the region of 

 Psychology and Logic, that is to say, within the enclosure 

 of an individually thinking, feeling, and willing person- 

 ality. It is true that what he related or described in 

 his several Critiques professed to refer to what all think- 

 ing, feeling, and willing minds have in common. His 

 psychology and theory of knowledge moved, as little as 

 did that of Locke and his school, within the region of the 

 purely subjective ; nevertheless all his statements refer 

 to what any individual mind could or must personally 

 observe and realise within itself. There is no doubt 

 that, in various passages of his two later Critiques, Kant 

 hinted at the conception of a position which was elevated 

 above and beyond the casualties of ordinary experience 

 or of merely subjective impulses. The Categorical Im- 

 perative, the " Ought " of our moral nature, the highest 

 moral law as well as the possibility of an intuitive intel- 

 lect, all these conceptions refer to something which ante- 

 cedes or supersedes casual, subjective, and temporary 

 facts and events. This suggestion Fichte took in real 

 earnest. He postulated, at the entrance of his philosophy, 

 an elevation of the thinking mind into that region where 

 the everyday distinctions of subject and object and of 

 many persons or selves would disappear. He here met 

 with the same difficulty of " solipsism " which confronted 

 Berkeley when he started from his own idealistic point 

 of view. The existence of many minds or selves with a 

 common world of objects obliged Berkeley to fall back 



VOL. III. 2 F 



