Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/438

 4i6 G. E. SCHULZE, MAIMOIf. self subsequently to Jacobi, and then to Bardili {Outlines of Logic ^ 1800), and to end with a verbal philosophy lacking both in influence and permanence. In Reinhold's elementary philosophy the thing in itself was changed from a problematical, negative, merely limit- ing concept into a positive element of doctrine. Objections were raised against Kantianism, as thus dogmatically modi- fied in the direction of realism, by Schulze, Maimon, and Beck — by the first for purposes of attack, by the second in order to further development, and by the third with an exe- getical purpose. Gottlob Ernst Schulze, professor in Helm- stadt, and from 18 10 in Gottingen, in his ^nesideinus (1792, published anonymously), which was followed later by psychological works, defended the skeptical position in opposition to the Critique of Reason. Hume's skepticism remains unrefuted by Kant and Reinhold. The thing in itself, which is to produce the material of representation by affecting the senses, is a self-contradictory idea. The application of the category of cause to things in themselves violates the doctrine that the latter are unknowable and that the use of the pure concepts of the understanding beyond the sphere of experience is inadmissible. The transcendental philosophy has never proved that the ground of the material of representation cannot, just as the form thereof, reside in the subject itself. Side by side with the anti-critical skepticism of ^neside- mus-Schulze, Salomon Maimon (died 1800; cf. Witte, 1876), who was highly esteemed by the greatest philosophers of his time, represents critical skepticism. With Reinhold he holds consciousness (as the combination of a manifold into objective unity) to be the common root of sensibility and understanding, and with Schulze, the concept of the thing in itself to be an imaginary or irrational quantity, a thought that cannot be carried out ; it is not only unknow- able, but unthinkable. That alone is knowable which we ourselves produce, hence only the form of representation. The matter of representation is " given," but this does not mean that it arises from the action of the thing in itself, but only that we do not know its origin. Understanding and sense, or spontaneity and receptivity, do not differ gener-