160 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



tion, all utilitarianism, all eudairaonism or hedonism ; 

 morality was solely based upon duty and acted on 

 principle. But Schiller in his essay on ' Grace and 

 Dignity ' conceived the union of duty and disposition in 

 the graceful. Whereas Kant gave, in questions of 

 morality, a voice solely to duty, Schiller desired that 

 grace should say to duty, " I will obey you, but you 

 must allow me to love you," but Kant would not allow 

 this. To him it seemed that Schiller had sacrificed the 

 majesty of duty by allying grace with dignity, and by 

 changing morality into beauty, by establishing a friend- 

 ship between the Eational and the Sensuous : wherever 

 a question of duty presents itself the graces must stand 

 aside. In this way Kant repudiated in the second 

 edition of his tract, the compromise of Schiller.^ 

 22. The next thinker of the first order who came under 



the influence of Kant's ethical doctrine, who felt the 

 necessity of giving it a deeper metaphysical foundation, 

 was Fichte. But Fichte developed also an entirely 

 different element which was contained in Kant's theo- 

 retical philosophy. He took up that peculiar method 

 introduced for the first time by Kant into philosophical 

 speculation, the critical or transcendental method. As 

 I have stated on an earlier occasion, Kant had found a 

 new formula for attacking philosophical problems which 

 had been pronounced insoluble by his predecessors such 

 as Hume and others. Assuming that we could not 

 psychologically explain how scientiiic knowledge origin- 

 ated and was maintained, that we were not able to 

 describe the genesis of knowledge in the human mind, 



' On all this see supra, p. 35. 



