3. While the subjective idealism of Fichte was carried out in the objective idealism of Schelling, and the absolute idealism of Hegel, there arose cotemporaneously with these systems a third offshoot of the Kantian criticism, viz., the philosophy of _Herbart_. It had its subjective origin in the Kantian philosophy, but its objective and historic connection with Kant is slight. It breaks up all historic continuity, and holds an isolated position in the history of philosophy. Its general basis is Kantian, in so far as it makes for its problem a critical investigation of the subjective experience. We place it between Fichte and Schelling.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was born at Düsseldorf in 1743. His father destined him for a merchant. After he had studied in Geneva and become interested in philosophy, he entered his father’s mercantile establishment, but afterwards abandoned this business, having been made chancellor of the exchequer and customs commissioner for Cleves and Berg, and also privy councillor at Düsseldorf. In this city, or at his neighboring estate of Pempelfort, he spent a great part of his life devoted to philosophy and his friends. In the year 1804 he was called to the newly-formed Academy of Sciences in Munich. In 1807 he was chosen president of this institution, a post which he filled till his death in 1819. Jacobi had a rich intellect and an amiable character. Besides being a philosopher, he was also a poet and citizen of the world; and hence we find in his philosophizing an absence of strict logical arrangement and precise expression of thought. His writings are no systematic whole, but are occasional treatises written “rhapsodically and in grasshopper gait,” for the most part in the form of letters, dialogues, and romances. “It was never my purpose,” he says himself, “to set up a system for the schools. My writings have sprung from my innermost life, and were the result of that which had taken place within me. In a certain sense I did not make them voluntarily, but they were drawn out of me by a higher power irresistible to myself.” This want of an inner principle of classification and of a systematic arrangement, renders a development of Jacobi’s philosophy not easy. It may best be represented under the following three points of view:—1. Jacobi’s polemic against mediate knowledge. 2. His principle of immediate knowledge. 3. His relation to the cotemporaneous philosophy, especially to the Kantian criticism.