(2) After all it was only formally, that the Kantian system established the principle that thought is spontaneous and self-determining. Into details of the manner and the extent of this self-determination of thought, Kant never went. It was Fichte who first noticed the omission; and who, after he had called attention to the want of a deduction for the categories, endeavoured really to supply something of the kind. With Fichte, the 'Ego' is the starting-point in the philosophical development: and the outcome of its action is supposed to be visible in the categories. But in Fichte the 'Ego' is not really presented as a free, spontaneous energy; it is supposed to receive its first excitation by a shock or impulse from without. Against this shock the 'Ego' will, it is assumed, react, and only through this reaction does it first become conscious of itself. Meanwhile, the nature of the impulse remains a stranger beyond our pale: and the 'Ego,' with something else always confronting it, is weighted with a condition. Fichte, in consequence, never advanced beyond Kant's conclusion, that the finite only is knowable, while the infinite transcends the range of thought. What Kant calls the thing-by-itself, Fichte calls the impulse from without--that abstraction of something else than 'I,' not otherwise describable or definable than as the negative or non-Ego in general. The 'I' is thus looked at as standing in essential relation with the not-I, through which its act of self-determination is first awakened. And in this manner the 'I' is but the continuous act of self-liberation from this impulse, never gaining a real freedom, because with the surcease of the impulse the 'I,' whose being is its action, would also cease to be. Nor is the content produced by the action of the 'I' at all different from the ordinary content of experience, except by the supplementary remark, that this content is mere appearance. [1] Even Hermann's 'Handbook of Prosody' begins with paragraphs of Kantian philosophy. In § 8 it is argued that a law of rhythm must be (1) objective, (a) formal, and (3) determined _à priori._ With these requirements and with the principles of Causality and Reciprocity which follow later, it were well to compare the treatment of the various measures, upon which those formal principles do not exercise the slightest influence. [2] In Kant's own words (Criticism of the Power of Judgment, p. 427): 'Final Cause is merely a notion of our practical reason. It cannot be deduced from any data of experience as a theoretical criterion of nature, nor can it be applied to know nature. No employment of this notion is possible except solely for the practical reason, by moral laws. The final purpose of the Creation is that constitution of the world which harmonises with that to which alone we can give definite expression on universal principles, viz. the final purpose of our pure practical reason, and with that in so far as it means to be practical.' CHAPTER V.