ive. It
is true that we are capable of forming certain grand ideas, such as that
of God, the universe, and the soul; but these are the pure products of
Reason, the mere personifications of our own modes of thinking, and have
no objective reality, at least none that can be scientifically
demonstrated. But, while "the Speculative Reason" is held to be
incompetent to prove the existence of God, "the Practical Reason" is
appealed to; and in the conscious liberty of the soul, and its sense of
incumbent moral duty,--"the Categorical Imperative,"--Kant finds
materials for reconstructing the basis and fabric of a true Theology,
not scientifically perfect, but practically sufficient for all the
purposes of life.

It was scarcely possible that Philosophy could find a permanent
resting-place in such a theory as this; for, while it recognized both
the "object" and the "subject" as equally indispensable, the one for the
_matter_, the other for the _form_, of human knowledge, it did not hold
the balance even between the two. It assigned so much to the "subject,"
and so little to the "object," and made so large a part of our knowledge
merely formal and subjective, that it could neither be regarded as a
self-consistent system of Skepticism, nor yet as a satisfactory basis
for Scientific Belief. It was almost inevitable that speculative minds,
starting from this point, should diverge into one or other of _three_
courses; either following the line of the "subject" exclusively, and
treating the "object" as a superfluous incumbrance, so as to reach, as
Schulz and Maimon did, a pure Subjective Idealism, akin to utter
Skepticism; or following the line of the "object," and giving it greater
prominence than it had in the system of Kant, so as to lay the
foundation, as Jacobi and Herbart did, of a system of Objective
Certitude; or keeping _both_ in view, and attempting, as Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel did, to blend the two into one, so as to reduce
them to systematic unity.[135]

In Kant's system a _dualism_ was admitted, a real distinction between
the "subject" and "object" of thought; but he had ascribed so much to
the subject, and so little to the object, that Fichte conceived the idea
of dispensing with the latter altogether, and constructing his whole
philosophy on a purely subjective basis. Since Kant had taught that all
objects are conceived of either according to the forms of our
sensational faculty, or the categories of our understan