Kant was not aware of this; and instead of developing with a mind free from prejudice the thought of his genius, he also allowed himself to be vanquished by the abstractionism of his time and out of the logical and philosophical _a priori_ synthesis he made the more or less arbitrary _a priori_ synthesis of the sciences. In this way, the apriority of the intuition led him, not to art, but to mathematics (transcendental Æsthetic)[14] the apriority of the intellect led him, not to Philosophy, but to Physics (abstract intellect): hence the impotence which afflicted that synthesis, when confronted with philosophic problems. When he discovered the _a priori_ synthesis, Kant had laid his hand upon a profoundly _romantic_ concept; but his treatment of it became afterwards _classicist_ and _intellectualist._ The synthesis is the palpitating reality which makes itself and knows itself in the making: the Kantian philosophy makes it rigid again in the concepts of the sciences; and it is a philosophy in which the sense of life, of imagination, of individuality, of history, is almost as completely absent as in the great systems of the Cartesian period. Whoever is not aware of this intimate drama and fails to understand this contradiction; whoever, when confronted with the work of Kant, is not seized with the need, either of going forward or of going backward, has not reached the heart of that soul, the centre of that mind. The old philosophers who condemned Kant as sceptical and as a corrupter of philosophy, and who confined themselves strictly to Wolfianism and to scholasticism, and the new who greeted him as a precursor and made of him a stepping-stone on which to mount higher,--these alone came truly into contact with Kant's philosophy. For in his case there are but two alternatives: abhorrence or attraction, loathing or love. In the midst of a battle one must flee or fight: to sit still and take one's ease is the attitude of the unconscious and the mad. Certainly it is better to fight than to flee, but it is better to flee than to sit inactive. He who flees, saves at least his own skin, or, to abandon metaphor, saves the old philosophy, which is still something; but the inactive man loses both life and glory, the old philosophy and the new. [Sidenote: _Advance upon Kant: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel._]