Abstract
In this paper, I present the early Wissenschaftslehre as the "strongest idealism" (Jacobi) in the sense of a consistent and completed critical transcendental idealism. In the first two parts, I outline some of the main impulses that led Fichte to this standpoint as well as selected misleading interpretations of his position.
The third part of the text is devoted to the method of the Wissenschaftslehre and to the ontological status of acts described in it. In the fourth part, I examine the status of the world, to which the real consciousness is necessarily related.
In this context, the thing-in-itself is presented as an integral part of the Wissenschaftslehre and as an "inconceivable" concept marking the necessary cognitive boundaries of the finite mind.