ESTIMATE OF LEIBNIZ'S PHILOSOPHY 179 



completeness ; and the system of Fichte has well been 

 described as t Spinoza in terms of Kant V 



Now the need of a thing-in-itself, such as Kant postu- 

 lates, arises from the thoroughness of his separation 

 between perception and conception, between sense and 

 understanding. They are correlative ; yet they are treated 

 by him as if quite independent, so that the result of 

 their combination is a merely phenomenal world. Per- 

 ception cannot evolve from itself the forms of the under- 

 standing, through which alone it loses its blindness ; and 

 conception cannot produce for itself the matter of sense 

 and experience, without which it is empty. But this 

 dualism indicates, in a negative way, the necessity of a 

 noumenal world, however completely such a world may 

 be beyond the reach of our intellectual comprehension 

 or proof. It is in revulsion from dogmatism that Kant 

 holds this position. And thus he is continually pointing 

 out that the great error of Leibniz is that of regarding 

 experience as a system of concepts, which may constitute 

 an internally self-consistent whole, but which has no cer- 

 tain contact with reality. Such a dogmatism, Kant holds, 

 has no answer to scepticism, and thus to give up the 

 sharp distinction between perception and conception is 

 to lose our grasp of reality and truth. 



Accordingly it is not surprising to find that, in setting 

 aside the thing-in-itself (as Kant understood it), Fichte 

 goes back to the doctrine of Leibniz and proceeds to 

 develop, under new conditions, some of its leading ideas 2 . 



1 Adamson's Fichte (Blackwood's Philosophical Classics), p. 130. 



2 ' The time is come for reviving the philosophy of Leibniz. . . . 

 Nothing is further removed from the thought of Leibniz than the 

 speculative dream of a world, of things-in-themselves, which no 

 mind comprehends or knows, but which nevertheless acts upon us 

 and produces all our ideas. The first of his thoughts, that which 

 he makes his starting-point, is, that the representations of external 

 things arise in the soul in virtue of its own laws, as in an isolated 

 world, and as if nothing were present in it except God (the Infinite) 

 and the soul (consciousness of the Infinite). ... In thus expressing 

 himself Leibniz spoke for philosophers. But now-a-days people 

 will insist on philosophizing, even when philosophy is the last 



K 2 



