he relation of what was subjective and what was
objective by identifying the former with the sensuous content of
experience and the latter with the application of the forms of
sensibility and understanding to this content. The relationship was
formal and dead. Kant recognized no functional relationship between the
nature of the _Mannigfaltigkeit_ of sensuous experience and the forms
into which it was poured. The forms remained external to the content,
but the relationship was one which existed within experience, not
without it, and within this experience could be found the necessity and
universality which had been located in the world independent of
experience. The melting of these fixed Kantian categories came with the
spring floods of the romantic idealism that followed Kant.

The starting-point of this idealism was Kantian. Within experience lay
the object of knowledge. The Idealist's principal undertaking was to
overcome the skepticism that attached to the object of knowledge because
of its reference to what lies outside itself. If, as Kant had undertaken
to prove, the reality which knowledge implies must reach beyond
experience, then, on the Kantian doctrine that knowledge lies within
experience, knowledge itself is infected with skepticism. Kant's
practical bridge from the world of experience to the world of
things-in-themselves, which he walked by faith and not by sight, was
found in the postulates of the conduct of the self as a moral being, as
a personality. The romantic idealists advance by the same road, though
as romanticists not critical philosophers, they fashioned the world of
reality, that transcends experience, out of experience itself, by
centering the self in the absolute self and conceiving the whole
infinite universe as the experience of the absolute self. The
interesting phase of this development is that the form which experience
takes in becoming objective is found in the nature and thought of the
individual, and that this process of epistemological experience becomes
thus a process of nature, if the objective is the natural. In Kant's
terms our minds give laws to nature. But this nature constantly exhibits
its dependence upon underlying noumena that must therefore transcend the
laws given by the understanding. The Romanticist insists that this other
reality must be the same stuff as that of experience, that in experience
arise forms which transcend those which bound the experience in its
earlier