 It must be granted that the truth of the Wissenschaftslehre’s starting point cannot be established by any philosophical means, including its utility as a philosophical first principle. On the contrary—and this is one of Fichte’s most characteristic and controversial claims—one already has to be convinced, on wholly extra-philosophical grounds, of the reality of one’s own freedom before one can enter into the chain of deductions and arguments that constitute the Wissenschaftslehre. This is the meaning of Fichte’s oft-cited assertion that “the kind of philosophy one chooses depends upon the kind of person one is.” The only compelling reason why the transcendental idealist comes to a stop with—and thus begins his system with—the proposition that “the I freely posits itself” is therefore not because he is unable to entertain theoretical doubts on this score nor because he is simply unable to continue the process of reflective abstraction. Instead, he appeals to a principle eloquently expressed by Fichte in his essay “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Moral Governance of the World,” namely: “I cannot go beyond this standpoint because I am not permitted to do so.” It is precisely because the categorical imperative is in this way invoked to secure the first principle of his entire system that Fichte felt entitled to make the rather startling claim that the Wissenschaftslehre is the only system of philosophy that “accords with duty.”