A German philosopher, born at Düsseldorf; bred for business, and after engaging in it for a time threw it up for a revenue appointment; devoted all his by-hours to philosophy and correspondence with eminent men, and was appointed President of the Academy of Sciences at Münich in 1807; he formed no system and he founded no school; his thoughts present themselves in a detached form, and are to be gathered from letters, dialogues, and imaginative works; he contended for the dogma of "immediate cognition as the special organ of the supersensuous," and failed to see, as Schwegler notes, that said cognition "has already described a series of subjective intermediating movements, and can pretend to immediacy only in entire oblivion of its own nature and origin" (1743-1819).