one cannot remain there.  Fichte has drawn the correct conclusion from the Kantian premises; idealism is the unavoidable result of the Critique of Reason and foretold by; it as the Messiah was foretold by John the Baptist.  And by the evil fruit we know the evil root:  the idealistic theory is philosophical nihilism, for it denies the reality of the external world, as the materialism of Spinoza denies a transcendent God and the freedom of the will.  Reality slips away from both these systems—­they are the only consistent ones there are—­material reality escaping from the former and suprasensible reality from the latter; and this must be so, because reality, of whatever kind it be, cannot be known, but only believed and felt.  The actual, the existence of the noumenal as well as of the external world, even the existence of our own body, makes itself known to us through revelation alone; the understanding comprehends relations only; the certainty that a thing exists is attained only through experience and faith.  Sense and reason are the organs of faith, and hence the true sources of knowledge; the former apprehends the natural, the latter, the supernatural, while for the understanding is left only the analysis and combination of given intuitions.

Philosophy as a science from concepts must necessarily prove atheistic and fatalistic.  Conception and proof mean deduction from conditions.  How shall that which has no cause from which to explain it, the unconditioned, God, and freedom, be comprehended and proved?  Demonstration rises along the chain of causes to the universe alone, not to a transcendent Creator; mediate knowledge is confined to the sphere of conditioned being and mechanical becoming.  The intuitive knowledge of feeling alone leads us beyond this, and along with the wonderful, the inconceivable power of freedom in ourselves, which is above all nature, shows us the primal source of all wonders, the transcendent God above us.  The inference from our own spiritual, self-conscious, free personality to that of God is no unauthorized anthropomorphism—­in the knowledge of God we may fearlessly deify our human existence, because God, when he created man, gave his divine nature human form.  Reason and freedom are the same:  the former is theoretical, the latter practical elevation to the suprasensible.  Nevertheless virtue is not based upon an inflexible, despotic, abstractly, formal law, but upon an instinct, which, however, does not aim at happiness.  Thus Jacobi attempts to mediate between the ethics of the Illumination and the ethics of Kant, by agreeing with the former in regard to the origin of virtue (it arises from a natural impulse), and with the latter in regard to its nature (it consists in disinterestedness).  Hence with the Illumination he rejects the imperative form, and with Kant the eudemonistic end.  At the same time he endeavors to introduce Herder’s idea of individuality into ethics, by demanding that morality assume a special form in each man.  Schiller and the romantic school take from Jacobi their ideal of the “beautiful soul,” which from natural impulse realizes in its action, and still more in its being, the good in an individual way.