  Fichte’s next obvious step was to remove the ground of the illusion by declaring the ideal constructs of reason to be themselves the objects of the transcendent knowledge that reason desires — in effect, of identifying God with the logical order of things. And Fichte, according to Jacobi, quite consistently also took as the test of true personality the capacity on the part of a self to reconstruct the whole of nature a priori from the principles of that logic, thus reenacting ideally God’s creative deed. In fact, however, such a logic was from the start the product of understanding’s abstractions. It has no content of its own. The idealizing activities of a self cannot in fact be realized, therefore, except by attending to the material details of nature. And since, even when idealized, nature still remains ‘nature’, it follows according to Jacobi that in practice Fichte’s idealism is but a form of materialism. Schelling’s naturalism only made this fact explicit. In sum, the great hoax that according to Jacobi idealism had perpetrated — starting with Kant and concluding with Schelling — was to give to believe, not indeed that the human spirit can dispense with Things Divine, but that these things can be saved and attained in the impersonal medium of nature.