CHAPTER VIII. 

 THE PROGRAM FOR PHILOSOPHY. 



The significance of the critical philosophy of Kant in regard 

 to the problems of knowledge and morals, and in regard to the 

 relation of science and philosophy cannot easily be overemphasized. 

 This is all the more true because the investigations embodied in the 

 critiques form in a very true sense a focus in which the tendencies 

 of the past converge and from which arise likewise new and diverg- 

 ing lines of thought. One of the most outstanding of these post- 

 Kantian developments is the so-called idealistic tendency, the main 

 representatives of which were Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. 



Kant, it will be remembered, had emphasized two stems of 

 human knowledge, sensibility and understanding, behind which, he 

 suggested, there may be a common root unknown to us. It was 

 this suggestion which engaged the attention of Fichte, and the 

 result was his denial of any thing-in-itself behind the phenomenal 

 world other than the noumenal subject, the Ego, as he called it. 

 Schelling, however, in his "System of Transcendental Idealism", 

 was not content, like Fichte, to take his stand upon one of the 

 transcendents of Kant, and claimed that there are an Ego and a 

 Non-Ego, a transcendent subject and a transcendent object, but 

 behind these two, again, there is a common source of both, wherein 

 all opposition of Ego and Non-Ego disappear. This is the Abso- 

 lute, the synthesis of all contraries. Philosophy is the science of 

 this Absolute which manifests itself in a double manner as Nature 

 and as Mind. Hegel, however, modified this Kantian-Spinozistic 

 world-view of Schelling, by claiming that the common source of the 

 Ego and the Non-Ego does not transcend mind and nature These 

 latter are not rnanifestations of a hidden and unchanging Absolute, 

 but the Absolute is mind and nature. It is no longer transcendent; 

 it is no longer unchanging. The Absolute is the process itself. 



In this way, Hegel endeavoured to break down the dualism, 

 which, because of the retention of the thing-in-itself, was to be 



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