This is a grand word: and yet we feel that, in the intensity of intellectual consecutiveness and moral inflexibleness, we have lost some elements to which Kant had given their place in the philosophy of life. The third of Kant's three Criticisms is conspicuous by its absence from the Fichtean field of view, and has no recognition in this scheme of the universe: and the great conception of the natural world as an organism, in which natural man is only a part, and all is controlled by an autonomous principle of life, has been for the while allowed to drop. Even more than in Kant religion tends to be an epilogue or appendix to morality: and God is identified with the moral order of the world. It is customary to speak of Fichte's idealism as ethical, or as subjective: and so long as these words are understood, no harm is done. But to call it subjective does not mean that Fichte was so far beside himself as to believe the world was only a picture or a function of his individual brain. It means that he throws the weight too much on the side of subjectivity. The Absolute is, for him in his first stage, described as an Absolute Ego--and thereby the natural world seems to be left without God: and subjective duty has too exclusively thrown on it the weight of certifying objective existence. The world, as we shall see, and have indeed indirectly gathered from Kant, is too good and worthy to be the mere block of stone out of which our duties are to be hewn. And similarly, to call Fichte an ethical idealist is only to name him right, when we add that his were idealist ethics. The world is not here merely that social decorum may be maintained, and that puritanical virtue may pronounce that all is so well, that thenceforth there shall be no cakes and ale, nor ginger be hot in the mouth. The friend of the two brothers Schlegel, and their remarkable wives, Dorothea and Caroline, touched hands with a social group[12] which, for good and for ill, had emancipated itself from all codes except that which bids 'To thine own self be true: Thou canst not then be false to any man.' To him, as to Kant, morality presented itself as autonomy, as the dignity and grace of human nature in freest development; but to him, more than to Kant, there commended itself the ideal of a city of reason, a thoroughly socialised community[13], in which the welfare of each would be an obligation on all, and the machinery of government would be so marvellously self-corrective that all would do right and all fare well.