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CONCLUSION. 413 satisfaction is afforded for the hitherto unmet wishes of the heart and demands of the reason. The effect of the three Critiques upon the public was very varied. The first great work excited alarm by the sharpness of its negations and its destruction of dogmatic metaphysics, which to its earliest readers appeared to be the core of the matter; Kant was for them the universal destroyer. Then the Science of Knowledge brought into prominence the positive, boldly conquering side, the investi- gation of the conditions of empirical knowledge. In later times the endeavor has been made to do justice to both sides, but, in opposition to the overbold procedure of the constructive thinkers, who had fallen into a revived dog- matism, more in the spirit of caution and resignation. The second great work aroused glowing enthusiasm : " Kant is no mundane luminary," writes Jean Paul in regard to the Critique of Practical Reason, " but a whole solar system shin- ing at once." The third, because of its subject and by its purpose of synthetic reconciliation between fields hereto- fore sharply separated, gained the sympathy of our poet- heroes Schiller and Goethe, and awakened in a young, spec- ulative spirit Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Schelling reclaimed the intuitive understanding, which Kant had problematically attributed to the primal spirit, as the prop- erty of the philosopher, after Fichte had drawn attention to the fact that the consciousness of the categorical impera- tive, which Kant had not thoroughly investigated, could be nothing else than intellectual intuition, because in it know- ing and doing coincide. Fichte, however, does not derive the material for his system from the Critique of Judgment, though he also had a high appreciation of it, but from the two earlier Critiques, the fundamental conceptions of which he — following the hint that practical and theoretical reason are only different applications of one and the same reason — brings into the closest connection. He unites the cen- Kant admits that the mechanical explanation does not satisfy reason, and that, besides it, a judgment according to Ideas is legitimate. When, therefore, the speculation of the constructive school gives an ideal interpretation of the ■world, it may be regarded as an extended application of "regulative principles," which exceeds its authority only when it professes to be " objective knowl- edge."