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THE PHILOSOPHY OF ROMANTICISM

ophy. The fact that he was then able to accept a prolessorship in physics was a tribute to the breadth of his scholarship.

According to Kant the critical philosophy must consist of self-knowledge; Fries deplored the lack of a psychological foundation for such knowledge. According to him the problem of psychology consisted in discovering and describing the spontaneous forms with which our knowledge operates. Those fundamental concepts which constitute the scientific expression of these forms must then be deduced from psychological experience by the method of abstract analysis. Notwithstanding the fact that Fries clearly saw that we can have no guarantee that the fundamental concepts discovered by this empirico-analytic method are adequate, he was nevertheless convinced that Kant had succeeded in enumerating all of the fundamental concepts (categories). He accepted Kant's table of categories and of ideas. —On the other hand however he departs from Kant on one important point, namely, on the matter of establishing the objective validity of knowledge. Here he agrees. with Maimon that Kant had failed to establish the fight to apply the categories. Kant only answered the quæstio facti, not the quæstio juri. Truth can only consist in the agreement of mediate knowledge (of reason) with immediate (of perception), and beyond this it is impossible for us to transcend the subjective demonstration of knowledge. Fries regards the denial of this situation as the cause of the ultra-speculative tendency of the Romanticists (Neue Kritik der Vernunft, 1806-7).

According to Fries the real problem of philosophy consists in the application of the regressive, analytical method, which seeks to discover the fundamental con-