J. F. FRIES. 507 thinks " transcendental prejudice " has forced its way into philosophy, a phase of thought for which Kant himself was responsible by his anxiety to demonstrate everything. That a priori forms of knowledge exist cannot be proved by speculation, but only by empirical methods, and discovered by inner observation ; they are given facts of reason, of which we become conscious by reflection or psychological analysis. The a priori element cannot be demonstrated nor deduced, but only shown actually present. The ques- tion at issue* between Fries and the idealistic school therefore becomes, Is the discovery of the a priori element itself a cognition a priori ox a posteriori? Is the criticism of reason a metaphysical or an empirical, that is, an anthro- pological inquiry? Herbart decides with the idealists: " All concepts through which we think our faculty of knowl- edge are themselves metaphysical concepts " {Lehrbuch zur Einlcitiuig, p. 231). Fries decides: The criticism of reason is an empirico-psychological inquiry, as in general empirical psychology forms the basis of all philosophy. With the exception of this divergence in method Fries accepts Kant's results almost unchanged, unless we must call the leveling down which they suffer at his hands a con- siderable alteration. Only the doctrine of the Ideas and of the knowledge of reason is transformed by the intro- duction and systematization of Jacobi's principle of the immediate evidence of faith. Reason, the faculty of Ideas, i. e., of the indemonstrable yet indubitable principles, is fully the peer of the sensibility and the understanding. The same subjective necessity which guarantees to us the objective reality of the intuitions and the categories accom- panies the Ideas as well ; the faith which reveals to us the per se of things is no less certain than the knowledge of phenomena. The ideal view of the world is just as neces- sary as the natural view ; through the former we cognize the same world as through the latter, only after a higher order ; both spring from reason or the unity of transcendental apperception, only that in the natural view we are conscious of the fact, from which we abstract in the ideal view, that
- Cf. Kuno Fischer's Pro-Rectoral Address, Die beiden Kantischen Schulen
in Jena, 1862.
