251. We must observe the contradiction into which those philosophers fall who say: I cannot doubt what is subjective, what affects myself, what I feel within myself; but I have no right to go out of myself, and affirm that what I think is in reality as I think. Do you know that you feel, that you think, that you have within you such or such an appearance? Can you prove it? Evidently you cannot. You yield to a fact, to an internal necessity which forces you to _believe_ that you think, that you feel, or that such a thing appears to you; but then there is equal necessity in the connection of the object with the idea, an equal necessity forces you to _believe_ that what _appears_ to you to be in such or such a condition is as it appears. Neither case admits of demonstration; in both there is an indeclinable necessity: where, then, is philosophy, when it is attempted to establish so great a difference between things which admit of none? Fichte says: "It is impossible to explain in a precise manner how a philosopher can get beyond the _me_:"[21] and we may with equal reason say, that we cannot conceive how he has been able to raise a system upon the _me_. To what does he appeal? To a fact of consciousness, that is, to a necessity. And is not the assent to evidence, the certainty to which the reality apparently corresponds, also a necessity? On what does Fichte found his system of the _me_ and the _not-me_? We have only to read his works to see that he only founds it on considerations which suppose a value in certain ideas, a truth in certain judgments. Otherwise it is impossible to speak or to think: and this even he himself admits when, in commencing his investigations on the principle of our cognitions, he utters the words we have just quoted. He then confesses that we cannot take one step without trusting all the laws of general logic, which are _not always demonstrated, but are supposed tacitly admitted_. And what are these laws, without objective truths? What are they without the value of ideas, without correspondence with objects? Fichte says rightly, it is a circle; but he can no more get out of it than other philosophers. [21] _Wissenschaftslehre._ Erster Theil. § 3. 252. To take from ideas their objective value, to reduce them to mere subjective phenomena, to resist that internal necessity which obliges us to admit the correspondence of the soul to objects, is to destroy the very consciousness of the soul. This must have been seen, and this we think we can most evidently demonstrate.