FRIES, Jacob Friedrich (1773-1843), a distinguished post-Kantian writer on philosophy, was born at Barby, Saxony, August 23, 1773. He was educated in a community of the Moravian brethren, and in their seminary was trained for theology. In 1795 he entered at the university of Leipsic, and for some years studied philosophy there and at Jena. In 1801, after having acted for a time as private tutor, he began to deliver courses of philosophical lectures at Jena. These he continued, with an interval of two years spent in travels in Germany, France, and Italy, till 1806, when he was called to Heidelberg as professor of philosophy and elementary mathematics. His philosophical position with regard to his contemporaries he had already made clear in the critical work Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling (1803), and in the more systematic treatises System der Philosophie als evidenter Wissenschaft (1804), Wissen, Glauben, Ahnung (1805). Fries was an unusually prolific and somewhat hurried writer, and during the ten years he passed at Heidelberg he poured forth a variety of volumes, differing widely in value, on philosophy and theoretical physics. The most important treatise, and that by which he will always be remembered in the history of philosophy, was the Neue Kritik der Vernunft, 3 vols., 1807, an attempt to give a new foundation to the critical theory of Kant. In 1811 appeared his System der Logik, a very instructive work, and in 1814JuZ⅛s and Evagoras, a philosophical romance. In 1816 he was invited to Jena to fill the chair of theoretical philosophy, under which appear to have been included mathematics and physics, along with philosophy proper. In 1824 Fries was accused of democratic tendencies, and formally deprived of the right to deliver lectures on philosophical subjects, although he still retained his chair. He seems, however, towards the end of his life, to have resumed his philosophical teaching. He died on 10th August 1843. The most important of the many works written during his Jeua professorate are the Handbuch der praktischen Philosophie (vol. i.,1818, and vol. ii., 1832), the Handbuch der psychischen Anthropologie, 2 vols., 1820; Mathematische Naturphilosophie, 1822; System der Metaphysik, 1824; Geschichte der Philosophie, 1837 and 1840. Fries’s point of view in philosophy may be described as a modified Kantianism. With Kant he regarded Kritik, or the critical investigation of the faculty of knowledge, as the essential preliminary to philosophy. But b e d iffered from Kant both as regards the foundation for this criticism and as regards the metaphysical results yielded by it. Kant’s analysis of knowledge had disclosed the a priori element as the necessary complement of the isolated a posteriori facts of experience. But it did not seem to Fries that Kant had with sufficient accuracy examined the mode in which we arrive at knowledge of this a priori element. According to him we only know these a priori principles through inner or psychical experience; they are not then to be regarded as transcendental factors of all experience, but as the necessary, constant elements discovered by us in our inner experience. They are, in fact, to Fries, as to the Scotch school, the residuum which resists analysis. Accordingly Fries, like the Scotch school, places psychology or analysis of consciousness at the foundation of philosophy, and called his criticism of knowledge an anthropological critique. It requires very little consideration to see that Fries’s proposed amendment of Kantianism rests upon an altogether mistaken view of the transcendental element in knowledge. It is absurd to make the demand that what is a priori in cognition should be known by an a priori method. There is no such method. A second point in which Fries differed from Kant is the view taken as to the relation between immediate and mediate cognitions. According to Fries, the understanding is purely the faculty of proof; it is in itself void; immediate certitude is the only source of knowledge. Reason contains principles which we cannot demonstrate, but which can be deduced, and are the proper objects of belief. In this view of reason Fries approximates to Jacobi rather than to Kant. The Neue Kritik and the Psychische Anthropologie contain much that is admirable in the way of psychological analysis, but it cannot be thought that Fries has effected any real advance on the Kantian position. See Henke, J. F. Flies, 1867.