that their ideal element, that part of them which is not mere 'thing,'
the action and subject of the action, is their underlying reality.
According to Kant things exist in a world beyond us. Man has no faculty
by which he can penetrate into that world. Still, the farther we follow
Kant in his analysis the more does the contribution to knowledge from
the side of the mind tend to increase, and the more does the factor in
our impressions from the side of things tend to fade away. This basis of
impression being wholly unknowable is as good as non-existent for us.
Yet it never actually disappears. There would seem to be inevitable a
sort of kernel of matter or prick of sense about which all our thoughts
are generated. Yet this residue is a vanishing quantity. This seemed to
Fichte to be a self-contradiction and a half-way measure. Only two
positions appeared to him thorough-going and consequent. Either one
posits as fundamental the thing itself, matter, independent of any
consciousness of it. So Spinoza had taught. Or else one takes
consciousness, the conscious subject, independent of any matter or thing
as fundamental. This last Fichte claimed to be the real issue of Kant's
thought. He asserts that from the point of view of the thing in itself
we can never explain knowledge. We may be as skilful as possible in
placing one thing behind another in the relation of cause to effect. It
is, however, an unending series. It is like the cosmogony of the Eastern
people which fabled that the earth rests upon the back of an elephant.
The elephant stands upon a tortoise. The question is, upon what does the
tortoise stand? So here, we may say, in the conclusive manner in which
men have always said, that God made the world. Yet sooner or later we
come to the child's question: Who made God? Fichte rightly replied: 'If
God is for us only an object of knowledge, the _Ding-an-sich_ at the end
of the series, there is no escape from the answer that man, the thinker,
in thinking God made him.' All the world, including man, is but the
reflexion, the revelation in forms of the finite, of an unceasing action