oduction 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
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