German intellectual life in the wake of Kant's philosophical revolution was astonishingly rich and varied. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave rise to Hamann and Herder; Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin; the early Romantics, including Novalis and the Schlegels; and Schopenhauer. All of these authors made lasting contributions to philosophy and literature. The focus of this book, however, is the thinkers whose explicit aim was to complete the project of critical philosophy, and whose work towards that end contributed most signi-ficantly to the development of the movement now known as German Idealism. The key figures in this story are Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, who are the subjects of the next three chapters. This chapter offers an account of some of the initial responses to Kant that influenced the trajectory of these later idealists. The individuals discussed in this chapter – Jacobi, Reinhold and Schulze – have been selected for the direct role they played in the emergence of Fichte, and the specific texts discussed have been chosen for both their importance and their availability in English. The early Romantics are treated in the Conclusion, because although their work helped to propel the transition from Fichte to Schelling and Hegel, their primary tendency was to undermine, rather than attempt to fulfil, the philosophical aspirations of German Idealism.