1794 he accepted a call to the University of Kiel, where he taught till his death in 1823, although his independent activity had come to an end. In later life he was powerfully influenced by J. G. Fichte, and subsequently by F. H. Jacobi and Christoph Gottfried Bardili. However, his historical importance belongs entirely to his earlier activity. The development of the Kantian standpoint contained in the New Theory of Human Understanding (1789), and in the Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (1791), was called by its author Elementarphilosophie. Reinhold lays greater emphasis than Kant upon the unity and activity of consciousness. The principle of consciousness tells us that every idea is related both to an object and a subject, and is partly to be distinguished from and partly united to both. Since form cannot produce matter and a subject cannot produce an object, we are forced to assume a thing-in-itself. This is a notion which is self-contradictory if consciousness were to be essentially a relating activity. There is therefore something which must be thought and yet cannot be thought. Philosophical work Letters on the Kantian Philosophy As a former Catholic priest, Reinhold retained the values of Christian morality and individual dignity. The basic Christian doctrines of a transcendent God and an immortal human soul were presuppositions in his thinking. Reinhold tried to show that Kant's philosophy provided an alternative to either religious revelation or philosophical skepticism and fatalistic pantheism. But Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was a difficult and confusing book. It was not widely read and had little influence. Reinhold decided to write his comments on it in the literary journal The German Mercury. He skipped over the beginning and middle of the book and started at the end. Reinhold showed that the book was best read backwards, that is, starting with the end section. The last part of the Critique is where Kant discussed the issues of morality and their relation to the Rational Ideas of God, Free Will, and life after death. These issues were Reinhold's main concern. By presenting these concerns to the public, instead of the extremely difficult epistemology that took up most of the beginning and middle of the book, Reinhold aroused great interest. As a result, Kant's Critique immediately became a book of great importance. According to historian of philosophy Karl Ameriks, "Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel all developed their