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The new principle was now a universal or absolute one; but, as with Hegel, universal or absolute only in words, for to sense it is extremely real, just as Art in a certain sense is more real than the individual. It was the “generic conception of humanity, not something impersonal and universal but forming persons, inasmuch as only in persons have we reality.” (D. F. Strauss.)

If philosophic criticism were to go still farther than this, there remained nothing more for it than to destroy this generalisation, and instead of Humanity to make the individual, the person, the centre of thought. A strong individualistic and subjective feature, peculiar to the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, favoured such a process. Although in the case of Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling this feature had never outstepped the limits of the purely comprehensible, yet such a trait makes philosophy infer a similarly strongly developed feature of individualism in the people, especially as at that time it was so closely connected with popular life. Moreover, at that period there was a great desire (as we see in Fichte and his influence on the nation) to translate philosophy at once into action; and so it was not remarkable that a thinker regardless of consequences should introduce the idea of individualism into the field of action, and regard this also as suitable for “concentration of thought upon this present life.” Herewith began a new epoch; just as formerly human thought had proceeded from the individual up to the universal, so now it descended from the highest generalisation down again to the individual; to the process of getting free from self followed the regaining of self.