Jacobi agreed better with Kant, than with the post-Kantian philosophy. The atheistic tendency of the latter was especially repulsive to him. “To Kant, that profound thinker and upright philosopher, the words God, freedom, immortality, and religion, signified the same as they have ever done to the sound human understanding; he in no way treats them as nothing but deception. He created offence by irresistibly showing the insufficiency of all proofs of speculative philosophy for these ideas. That which was wanting in the theoretical proof, he made up by the necessary postulates of a pure practical reason. With these, according to Kant’s assurance, philosophy was fully helped out of her difficulty, and the goal, which had been always missed, actually reached. But the first daughter of the critical philosophy (Fichte’s system) makes the living and working moral order itself to be God, a God expressly declared to be without consciousness and self-existence. These frank words, spoken publicly and without restraint, roused some attention, but the fear soon subsided. Presently astonishment ceased wholly, for the second daughter of the critical philosophy (Schelling’s system) gave up entirely the distinction which the first had allowed to remain between natural and moral philosophy, necessity and freedom, and without any further ado affirmed that the only existence is nature, and that there is nothing above; this second daughter is Spinozism transfigured and reversed, an ideal materialism.” This latter allusion to Schelling, connected as it was with other and harder thrusts in the same essay, called out from this philosopher the well-known answer: “_Schelling’s Monument to the Treatise on Divine Things_, 1812.” If we now take a critical survey of the philosophical standpoint of Jacobi, we shall find its peculiarity to consist in the abstract separation of understanding and feeling. These two Jacobi could not bring into harmony. “There is light in my heart,” he says, “but it goes out whenever I attempt to bring it into the understanding. Which is the true luminary of these two? That of the understanding, which, though it reveals fixed forms, shows behind them only a baseless gulf? Or that of the heart, which points its light promisingly upwards, though determinate knowledge escapes it? Can the human spirit grasp the truth unless it possesses these two luminaries united in one light? And is this union conceivable except through a miracle?” If now, in order to escape in a certain degree this contradiction between understanding and feeling, Jacobi gave to immediate knowledge the place of mediate as finite knowledge, this was a self-deception. Even that knowledge, which is supposed to be immediate, and which Jacobi regards as the peculiar organ for knowing the supersensible, is also mediate, obliged to go through a course of subjective mediations, and can only give itself out as immediate when it wholly forgets its own origin. SECTION XLI. FICHTE