knowledge, but to all connected experience, is the knowing,
experiencing, thinking, acting self. It is that which says 'I,' the ego,
the permanent subject. But that is not enough. The knowing self demands
in turn a knowable world. It must have something outside of itself to
which it yet stands related, the object of knowledge. Knowledge is
somehow the combination of those two, the result of their co-operation.
How have we to think of this co-operation? Both Hume and Berkeley had
ended in scepticism as to the reality of knowledge. Hume was in doubt as
to the reality of the subject, Berkeley as to that of the object. Kant
dissented from both. He vindicated the undoubted reality of the
impression which we have concerning a thing. Yet how far that impression
is the reproduction of the thing as it is in itself, we can never
perfectly know. What we have in our minds is not the object. It is a
notion of that object, although we may be assured that we could have no
such notion were there no object. Equally, the notion is what it is
because the subject is what it is. We can never get outside the
processes of our own thought. We cannot know the thing as it is, the
_Ding-an-sich_, in Kant's phrase. We know only that there must be a
'thing in itself.'


FICHTE


Fichte asked, Why? Why must there be a _Ding-an-sich_? Why is not that
also the result of the activity of the ego? Why is not the ego, the
thinking subject, all that is, the creator of the world, according to
the laws of thought? If so much is reduced to idea, why not all? This
was Fichte's rather forced resolution of the old dualism of thought and
thing. It is not the denial of the reality of things, but the assertion