LIEBMANN, LANCE. 6iS the admirer of Fries, J. B. Meyer of Bonn, K. A. von Reichlin-Meldegg, and others had sought a point of depar- ture for their views in Kant ; that K, Fischer's work on Kant (i860) had given a lively impulse to the renewed study of the critical philosophy ; nay, that the cry " Back to Kant " had been expressly raised by Fortlage (as early as 1832 in his treatise The Gaps in the Hegelian Systejn), and by Zeller (p. 589). But the movement first became general after F. A, Lange in his History of Materialism had energetically ad- vocated the Kantian doctrine according to his special con- ception of it, after Helmholtz" (born 1821) had called atten- tion to the agreement of the results of physiology with those of the Critique of Reason, and at the same time Liebmann's youthful work, Kant and the Epigones, in which every chap- ter ended with the inexorable refrain, " therefore we must go back to Kant," had given the strongest expression to the longing of the time. Otto Liebmann (cf. also the chapter on " The Metamor- phoses of the A Priori " in his Analysis of Reality) sees the fundamental truth of criticism in the irrefutable proof that space, time, and the categories are functions of the intellect, and that subject and object are necessary correlates, in- separable factors of the empirical world, and finds Kant's fundamental error, which the Epigones have not corrected, but made still worse, in the non-concept of the thing in itself, which must be expelled from the Kantian philosophy as a remnant of dogmatism, as a drop of alien blood, and as an illegitimate invader which has debased it. According to Friedrich Albert Lange f (1828-75 ; during the last years of his life professor at Marburg), mate- rialism, which is unfruitful and untenable as a principle, a system, and a view of the world, but useful and indispen- sable as a method and a maxim of investigation, must be supplemented by formal idealism, which, rejecting all science from mere reason limits knowledge to the sensuous, to that
- Helmholtz : On Human Vision, 1855 ; Physiological Optics, 1867 ; Sensa-
tions of Tom, 1863, 4th ed., 1877 [English translation by Ellis, 2ded., 1885]. f F. A. Lange: Logical Studies, 1877. Cf. M. Heinzc in the Viertfljahrs~ schrift fiir wissenschaftliche Philosophic, 1877, and Vaihinger in the work cited above, p. 610 note.
