Fichte supposed that in these results he only expressed the true sense of the Kantian philosophy. “Whatever my system may properly be, whether the genuine criticism thoroughly carried out, _as I believe it is_, or howsoever it be named, is of no account.” His system, Fichte affirms, had the same view of the matter as Kant’s, while the numerous followers of this philosopher had wholly mistaken and misunderstood their master’s idealism. In the second introduction to the Theory of Science (1797), Fichte grants to these expounders of the Critick of pure Reason that it contains some passages where Kant would affirm that sensations must be given to the subject from without as the material conditions of objective reality; but shows that the innumerably repeated declarations of the Critick, that there could be no influence upon us of a real transcendental object outside of us, cannot at all be reconciled with these passages, if any thing other than a simple thought be understood as the ground of the sensations. “So long,” adds Fichte, “as Kant does not expressly declare that he derives sensations from an impression of some essentially thing, or, to use his terminology, that sensation must be explained from a transcendental object existing externally to us: so long will I not believe what these expounders tell us of Kant. But if he should give such an explanation, I should sooner regard the Critick of Pure Reason to be a work of chance than of design.” For such an explanation the aged Kant did not suffer him long to wait. In the _Intelligenzblatt der Allgemeinen Litteraturzeitung_ (1799), he formally, and with much emphasis, rejects the Fichtian improvement of his system, and protests against every interpretation of his writings according to the conceit of any mind, while he maintains the literal interpretation of his theory as laid down in the Critick of Reason. Reinhold remarks upon all this: “Since the well known and public explanation of Kant respecting Fichte’s philosophy, there can be no longer a doubt that Kant himself would represent his own system, and desire to have it represented by his readers, entirely otherwise than Fichte had represented and interpreted it. But from this it irresistibly follows, that Kant himself did not regard his system as illogical because it presupposed something external to the subjectivity. Nevertheless, it does not at all follow that Fichte erred when he declared that this system, with such a presupposition, must be illogical.” So much for Reinhold. That Kant himself did not fail to see this inconclusiveness, is evident from the changes he introduced into the second edition of the Critick of Pure Reason, where he suffered the idealistic side of his system to fall back decidedly behind the empirical.