we place the cause of this sensation as object, is a form of our intellect given a priori, and is consequently subjective. Therefore the whole empirical perception remains always upon a subjective foundation, as a mere process in us, and nothing entirely different from it and independent of it can be brought in as a thing in itself, or shown to be a necessary assumption. The empirical perception actually is and remains merely our idea: it is the world as idea. An inner nature of this we can only arrive at on the entirely different path followed by me, by means of calling in the aid of self-consciousness, which proclaims the will as the inner nature of our own phenomenon; but then the thing in itself will be one which is toto genere different from the idea and its elements, as I have explained.
The great defect of the Kantian system in this point, which, as has been said, was soon pointed out, is an illustration of the truth of the beautiful Indian proverb: "No lotus without a stem." The erroneous deduction of the thing in itself is here the stem; yet only the method of the deduction, not the recognition of a thing in itself belonging to the given phenomenon. But this last was Fichte's misunderstanding of it, which could only happen because he was not concerned with truth, but with making a sensation for the furtherance of his individual ends. Accordingly he was bold and thoughtless enough to deny the thing in itself altogether, and to set up a system in which, not, as with Kant, the mere form of the idea, but also the matter, its whole content, was professedly deduced a priori from the subject. In doing this, he counted with perfect correctness upon the want of judgment and the stupidity of the public, which accepted miserable sophisms, mere hocus-pocus and senseless babble, for proofs; so that he succeeded in turning its attention from Kant to himself, and gave the direction to German philosophy in which it was afterwards carried further by Schelling, and ultimately reached its goal in the mad sophistry of Hegel.
I now return to the great mistake of Kant, already
