 In the first public announcement of his conversion to the Wissenschaftslehre, Reinhold discusses three primary issues deficient in the Elementary Philosophy, for which the Wissenschaftslehre is supposed to account: first, the a priori possibility of consciousness; second, objective matter; and third, the unconditioned unity of theoretical and practical reason. Concerning the first point, Reinhold had previously regarded Fichte’s pure I as an inconceivable basis of philosophy, if the Principle of Consciousness were not presupposed. However, by early 1797 Reinhold realized “that the possibility of consciousness determined a priori [...] can by no means be traced to the mere subject of consciousness” (Vermischter Schriften II, p. vii; RGS 5/2, 4). This is because the subject of consciousness, as it relates to an object in representation, can be only the “empirical I,” and therefore cannot serve as an a priori condition of consciousness (Vermischter Schriften II, p. x; RGS 5/2, 5). Instead, the synthetic unity between subject and object in consciousness presupposes an original activity of the absolute subject.