 Though this doctrine of the Anstoß may seem to play a role in Fichte’s philosophy not unlike that which has sometimes been assigned to the thing in itself in the Kantian system, the fundamental difference is this: the Anstoß is not something foreign to the I. Instead, it denotes the I’s original encounter with its own finitude. Rather than claim that the Not-I is the cause or ground of the Anstoß, Fichte argues that the former is posited by the I precisely in order to “explain” to itself the latter, that is, in order to become conscious of the same. Though the Wissenschaftslehre demonstrates that such an Anstoß must occur if self-consciousness is to be actual, transcendental philosophy itself is quite unable to deduce or to explain the actual occurrence of such an Anstoß—except as a condition for the possibility of consciousness. Accordingly, there are strict limits to what can be expected from any a priori deduction of experience. According to Fichte, transcendental philosophy can explain, for example, why the world has a spatio-temporal character and a causal structure, but it can never explain why objects have the particular sensible properties they happen to have or why I am this determinate individual rather than another. This is something that the I simply has to discover at the same time that it discovers its own freedom, and indeed, as a condition for the latter. (It must be admitted, however, that Fichte’s own ambitious descriptions of his project sometimes obscure the essential limits of the same and that he sometimes gives his readers the false impression that the Wissenschaftslehre proposes to provide a complete a priori deduction of all the empirical details of experience. This however is certainly not the case.)