Fichte asserts the methodological primacy of practical reason because appealing to the immediate consciousness of the moral law is the only way in which critical idealism can be philosophically maintained. Following Reinhold, Fichte claims that a systematic philosophy must be grounded in an immediately certain first principle; and, drawing on Kant, Fichte claims that the only possible starting point of a defensible philosophy is our immediate consciousness of moral constraint, which provides a certain ground through which idealism can be advanced as a science. Just as the fact of reason establishes a practical claim about freedom's reality, so too for Fichte does the consciousness of the moral law establish the reality of one' s (intellectual intuition of) freedom, and thus a philosophical account according to which objective representations are grounded in the activity of the I.