Philos. A subjective object; the immediate object of cognition presented to the mind as distinguished from the real object; applied by Fichte to the ego.
1821. Coleridge, in Blackw. Mag., X. 249/1. The subject witnesses to itself that it is a mind, i.e. a subject-object, or subject that becomes an object to itself.
1836–7. Sir W. Hamilton, Metaph., xxiii. (1859), II. 69. The immediate object, or object known in this act, should be called the subjective object, or subject-object, in contradistinction to the mediate or unknown object, which might be discriminated as the object-object.
1847. Lewes, Hist. Philos. (1867), II. 485. The thought is necessarily and universally subject-object, matter is necessarily, and to us universally object-subject.
1897. trans. Fichte’s Sci. Ethics, 47. This whole Ego, in so far as it is neither subject nor object, but subject-object, has, in itself, a tendency to absolute self-activity.
Hence Subject-objectivity, a being that is subject and object, conscious being.
1848. W. Smith, Fichte’s Pop. Wks., I. 440. I am subject and object:—and this subject-object-ivity, this return of knowledge upon itself, is what I mean by the term ‘I.’
