604 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



10. 

 Two views 

 as to unifi- 

 cation pro- 

 voked by 

 Kant. 



of in his scientific and popular writings might be 

 brought together into a comprehensive view, and that 

 this would necessarily bear a personal and subjective 

 character. And as such, i.e., in the fragmentary form 

 of indications and suggestions, this, the last import- 

 ant systematic attempt in Germany, has indeed re- 

 mained, and the more so because its author was called 

 away before he. had time to write the third and con- 

 cluding volume of his system. But, as he himself 

 said about Kant, the promised system would probably 

 not have contained any fundamental contributions which 

 we may not be able to trace, at least in outline, from his 

 earlier writings. 



So far then as the unification of thought is concerned, 

 the writings of Kant provoked two distinct departures, 

 the one earlier, the other later. The earlier fastened 

 upon the so-called dualism of his system, proclaimed this 

 to be intolerable, and attempted to remove it by look- 

 ing out for some principle which lay deeper than the 

 position from which Kant had started. This dualism 

 appeared prominently in Kant's distinction between 

 theoretical and practical reason, and a solution was 

 supposed to be contained in a suggestion which Kant 

 himself threw out in his third ' Critique,' in which he 

 deals with the a^sthetical problem and puts forward 

 the idea of Purpose in the world as a regulative prin- 

 ciple which the thinking mind could make use of in 

 its search for purely causal or mechanical connections. 

 Both Fichte and Schelling started from these later 

 indications of Kant, whereas Eeinhold had confined 



