Kant left nothing of the material world but an indescribable _noumenon_, which did not even exist in space. Of course the categories of Aristotle, classifying as they did those relations which constitute our knowledge of this world, were converted by him into mere forms of the _understanding_, moulding the given products of the _sensibility_. Certain other regulative modes of thought predominating, in their turn, over the products of the _understanding_, he called ideas of the _pure reason_. His successor, Fichte, it will be seen, advanced but little further when he pronounced for a system of _idealism_. The subjective nature of our knowledge had been laid down; there was nothing left of the real world but this _noumenon_ which had been ejected from the realm of space; he acted, therefore, a consistent and charitable part, in taking this forlorn and banished entity into the region, at least, of thought. All the external world is now but a projection from the individual mind--the _non-ego_ is but another development of the _ego_--the _object_ is nothing but a sort of limitation or contrast which the subject throws out, to make a life for itself; the web it spins in the blank infinitude. Of the whole material world we have for ever got rid. Here it might be supposed that speculation in this direction had reached its extreme point; and as idealism is a system in which the mind cannot long rest, contradicting, as it does, its ineradicable convictions, that here would commence a philosophical revolution, and a return to a more sober and accurate method of investigation. But the German mind has put forth at this point an astonishing fertility. It has played with this idealism, refined upon it, varied it, produced new phases of it; reviving the strangest paradoxes of the Alexandrian school; and teaching--in this, the nineteenth century--with the gravest confidence in the world--with all the assurance of an ancient Scald chanting forth his mythological fables, a whole system of idealistic cosmogony! Schelling, in his idealism, in some measure reinstated the _object_; not by reviving the vulgar notion of its reality, but declaring it to be in its essence identical with the _subject_, and pronouncing both to have an equally real or equally ideal existence. He thus got rid of the embarrassment which encounters us in the ordinary systems of idealism, of the subjective _Ego_ producing the objective _Ego_. _Thought_ and _thing_ are identical. But this identity is to be recognised only in the mind of God, in the absolute--which develops what in itself is unity in the form of a duality. As if (to use a rude illustration) the same image should be shot from the interior of a magic lantern through two diverging tubes, making that twofold which was itself identical.