This doctrine of phenomenal knowing was outgrown in Germany at the commencement of the present century. In 1791—ten years after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason—the deep spirit of Fichte began to generalize Kant’s labors, and soon he announced the legitimate results of the doctrine. Schelling and Hegel completed the work of transforming what Kant had left in a negative state, into an affirmative system of truth. The following is an outline of the refutation of Kantian scepticism: I. Kant reduces all objective knowledge to phenomenal: we furnish the form of knowing, and hence whatever we announce in general concerning it—and all that we call science has, of course, the form of generality—is merely our subjective forms, and does not belong to the thing in itself. II. This granted, say the later philosophers, it follows that the subjective swallows up all and becomes itself the universal (subject and object of itself), and hence Reason is the true substance of the universe. Spinoza’s _substance_ is thus seen to become _subject_. We partake of God as intellectually seeing, and we see only God as object, which Malebranche and Berkeley held with other Platonists. 1. The categories (e. g. Unity, Reality, Causality, Existence, etc.) being merely subjective, or given by the constitution of the mind itself—for such universals are presupposed by all experience, and hence not derived from it—it follows: 2. If we abstract what we know to be subjective, that we abstract all possibility of a thing in itself, too. For “existence” is a category, and hence if subjective, we may reasonably conclude that nothing objective can have existence. 3. Hence, since one category has no preference over another, and we cannot give one of them objectivity without granting it to all others, it follows that there can be no talk of _noumena_, or of things in themselves, _existing_ beyond the reach of the mind, for such talk merely applies what it pronounces to be subjective categories, (existence) while at the same time it denies the validity of their application. III. But since we remove the supposed “_noumena_,” the so-called phenomena are not opposed any longer to a correlate beyond the intelligence, and the _noumenon_ proves to be _mind itself_. An obvious corollary from this is, that by the self-determination of mind in pure thinking we shall find the fundamental laws of all phenomena.