Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/437

RE IN HOLD. 415 Schiller, Kant's Letter on Bookjnaking, and Ficlite's cut- ting disposal of him, Nicolai's Life and Peculiar Opinions). The attacks of the faith-philosophers have been already- noticed (pp. 310-314). The advance from Kant to Fichte was preparing alike among friends and enemies, and this in two points. The demand was in part for a formal complement (a first prin- ciple from which the Kantian results could be deduced, and by which the dualism of sense and understanding could be overcome), in part for material correction (the removal of the thing in itself) and development (to radical idealism). Karl Leonhard Reinhold (born at Vienna in 1758 ; fled from a college of the St. Barnabite order, 1783 ; in 1787-94 professor in Jena, and then as the successor of Tetens in Kiel, where he died in 1823) undertook the former task in his Attempt at a New Theory 0/ the Human Faculty of Representation, 1789. Kant's classical theory of the faculty of cognition requires for its foundation a theory of the faculty of representation, or an elementary philoso- phy, which shall take for its object the deduction of the sev- eral functions of reason (intuition, concept. Idea) from the original activity of representation. The Kantian philoso- phy lacks a first principle, which, as first, cannot be demon- strable, but only a fact immediately evident and admitted by everyone. The primal fact, which we seek, is conscious- ness. No one can dispute that every representation con- tains three things : the subject, the object, and, between the two, the activity of representation. Accordingly the principle of consciousness runs: "The representation is distinguished in consciousness from the represented [object] and the representing [subject], and is referred to both." From this first principle Reinhold endeavors to deduce the well-known principles of the material manifold given by the action of objects, and the forms of representation spontane- ously produced by the subject, which combine this mani- fold into unity. When, a few years later, Fichte's Science of Knowledge brilliantly succeeded in bridging the gap between sense and understanding by means of a first prin- ■ ciple, thus accomplishing what Reinhold had attempted, ' the latter became one of his adherents, only to attach him