The Romantic worship of imagination had already begun with Fichte. He explained the world as the result of an unconscious, yet to a thinker comprehensible, act of the free, yet at the same time limited, Ego. This act, he maintains, emanates from the creative imagination. By means of it the world which we apprehend with the senses first becomes to us a real world. The whole activity of the human mind, then, according to Fichte, springs from the creative imagination; it is the instinct which he regards as the central force of the active Ego. The analogy with the imaginative power which is so mighty in art is evident. But what Fichte himself failed to perceive is, that imagination is by no means a creative, but only a transforming, remodelling power, since what it acts upon is only the form of the things conceived of, not their substance. Fichte says that he "does not require 'things,' and does not make use of them, because they prevent his self-dependence, his independence of all that is outside of himself." This saying is closely allied to Friedrich Schlegel's observation, "that a really philosophic human being should be able to tune himself at will in the philosophical or philological, the critical or poetical, the historical or rhetorical, the ancient or modern key, as one tunes an instrument, and this at any time and to any pitch." According to the Romantic doctrine, the artistic omnipotence of the Ego and the arbitrariness of the poet can submit to no law. In this idea lies the germ of the notorious Romantic irony in art, the treating of everything as both jest and earnest, the eternal self-parody, the disturbing play with illusions alternately summoned up and banished, which destroys all directness of effect in many of the favourite works of the Romanticists.