Chapter 5

[1]Spinoza,Eth.ii. 7-13.

[2]Encyclopaedia, §§ 415, 420. Consciousness is only as it were the surface of the ocean of mind; and reflects only the lights and shadows in the sky above it.

[3]It is not the least of the merits of the exposition in Caird'sCritical Philosophyof Immanuel Kant, vol. i. to have brought out this.

Kant's answer to his question was briefly this. Intelligence is essentially synthetic, always supplementing the given by something beyond, instituting relationships, unifying the many, and thus building up concrete totalities. In pure mathematics this is obvious: the process of numeration shows it creating number out of units, and geometry shows elementary propositions leading on to complicated theorems. In abstract physics it is hardly less obvious: there, e.g., the principle of reason and consequent or the persistence of substance are rational and legitimate steps beyond the mere datum. The more important question follows. How are these 'pure' syntheses applicable to real fact? To that Kant replies: They apply, because in all that we call real or objective fact there is a subjective element or constituent. What appears to be purely given, and independent of our perceptions, is a product of perceptual and conceptual conditions,—is constituted by a synthesis in perception, imagination, conception. Our world is a mental growth—not our individual product, but the work of that common mind in which we live and think, and which lives and thinks in us. Anyhow it is not an isolated self-existing un-intelligent world for ever materially outside us—an other world,eternally separate from us; but bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, the work realised by our great 'elder brother,'—the Idea of human collectivity—the Reason or Spirit in which we are all one soul. It is therefore no unwarranted step on to a foreign property when we apply the categories of thought and forms of sense to determine objective reality: for objective reality has been for ever made, and is now making, objective and reality by the conscious or unconscious syntheses of perception and imagination.

There remains the answer to the same question as regards the objects of Metaphysics. These objects are according to Kant inferences, and illegitimate inferences. They are not necessary elements or factors in the constitution of experience. In order that there should be experience, knowledge, science, there must be an endless hold of space and time in which to stow it clearly and distinctly away: and there must also be ties and relations binding it part to part, links of reference and correlation, a sort of logical elastic band that will stretch to include infinitely copious materials. But each real knowledge attaches to a definite assignable perception, in a single place and time. From this point we can travel—by means of like points—practically without limit in any direction. But though the old margin fades forever and forever as we move, a new margin takes its place: the limitation and finitude remain: and new acquisitions are always balanced in part by the loss of the old. Yet the heart and the imagination are clamorous, and the intellect is ready to serve them. Such an intellect Kant has called Reason, and its products (Platonic) 'Ideas.' The (Platonic) Idea expresses not so much an object of knowledge as a postulate, a problem, an act of faith. The 'Vaulting ambition' Intelligence 'o'erleaps itself and falls ont'other,' Unsatisfied with a bundle of sensations and ideas, it demands their abiding unity in a substantial Soul. To simplify the endlessness of physical phenomena, it sums them up in a Universe. To gather all mental and physical diversities and divisions into one life, it creates the ideal of God.

Each single experience, and the collected aggregate of these experiences, is felt to fall short of a complete total: and yet this complete total, the ultimate unity, is itself not an experience at all. But, if it be no object of experience, it is still an idea on which reason is inevitably driven: and the attempt to apprehend it, in the absence of experience, gives rise to the theories of Metaphysics. Everything, however, which can be in the strict sense of the word known, must be perceived in space and time, or, in other words, must lie open to experience. Where experience ends, human reason meets a barrier which checks any efficient progress, but refuses to recognise the check as due to a natural limit which it is really impossible to pass. The idea of completeness, of a rounded system, or unconditional unity, is still left, after the categories of the understanding have done their best: and is not destroyed although its realisation or explication is declared to be impossible.

There is thus left unexplained a totality which encompasses all the single members of experience—a unity compared to which the several categories are only a collection of fragments—an infinite which commands and regulates the finite concepts of the experiential intellect. But in the region of rational thought there is no objective and independent standard by which we can verify the conclusions of Reason. There are no definite objects, lying beyond the borders of experience, towards which it might unerringly turn; and its sole authentic use, accordingly, is to see that the understanding isthorough and exact, when it deals in the co-ordination of experiences. In this want of definite objects, Reason, whenever it acts for itself, can only fall into perpetual contradictions and sophistries. Pure Reason, therefore, the faculty of ideas, the organ of Metaphysics, does not of itself 'constitute' knowledge, but merely 'regulates' the action of the understanding.

By this rigour of demonstration Kant dealt a deadly blow, as it seemed, to the dogmatic Metaphysics, and the Deism of his time. Hume had shaken the certainty of Metaphysics and thrown doubt upon Theology: but Kant apparently made an end of Metaphysics, and annihilated Deistic theology. The German philosopher, as Hegel has said and Heine has repeated, did thoroughly and with systematic demonstration what Voltaire did with literary graces and not without the witticisms with which the French executioner gives thecoup de grâce.When a great idea had been degraded into a vulgar doctrine and travestied in common reality, the Frenchman met its inadequacies with graceful satire, and showed that these half-truths were not eternal verities. The German made a theory and a system of what was only a sally of criticism; and rendered the criticism wrong, by making it too consistent and too logical[1].

Science—such is Kant's conclusion—is of the definite and detailed, of the conditioned. It goes from point to point, within the enveloping unity of what we call experience, and which rests upon the transcendental and original unity of consciousness. But a knowledge of the whole—of the enveloping unity—is a contradiction in terms. To know is to synthetise: you cannot synthetise synthesis. Knowledge is of the relative: but an absolute and unconditional totality has no relations. We may therefore, possibly, feel, believe in, presupposethe absolute: but know it in the stricter sense, we cannot. It may be the object of a rational faith. But as for knowledge, we can get on in psychology without the invisible and immortal soul: we can carry out sciences of the physical universe, without troubling ourselves about the 'cosmological' questions of ultimate atoms or ultimate void, of first beginning and final end: and no proofs will ever prove theexistenceof that 'ideal' of reason—briefly termed God—which transcends and completes and creates all existence. Not that such Ideas are useless even in science. They represent—if not without risks—the faith and the presupposition which underlie the spirit of scientific progress, and set before it an ideal perfection which it will do well to strive after, though it can never get beyond approximations. What is perhaps more important: this faith of reason science is as little competent to disprove, as it is incompetent to prove it. Science is not all in all: we are more than mere theoretical and cognitive beings. The logic of science is not the sole code of our spiritual or higher intellectual life;

'We live by admiration, hope, and love.'

The sequel and development of the first Criticism are found in Kant's works on ethics, aesthetics, teleology and religion. Only in one supplementary chapter, and in casual indications as need arises, has Kant made any pronouncement on his view of Philosophy as a whole and as a system. That it is and can only be a system, when it really engages on reconstruction in theory, was of course his fundamental insight. But in his stage ofZetesis[2], of testing and sifting the soundfrom the professed, he has confined himself to breaking up the mass piecemeal, and leaving each result in its turn to corroborate and correct the other. Sense and intellect may spring from a common stem; but let us, he says, deal with them in their apparent separateness. Reason practical must no doubt be identical at bottom with reason theoretical: all the more convincing will be the undesigned coincidence between the results of an inquiry into the principles of science, and one into the principles of morals. We have seen that science ultimately rests—though it does not discuss it and would indeed be incompetent to do so—on a faith, a hope, a postulate of the ultimate supremacy of intelligence,—the faith of reason in its own power (not verifiable indeed by an exhaustive list of actual results)—or in the rationality of the world. For science—though a kind of action and a part of conduct—is a sort of inactive action: anenclavein the busy world, a period of preparation for the battle of life. In the field of conduct the ultimate presupposition, which was for the luxury of science called a reasonable faith or faith of reason, makes itself felt in the more forcible form of a categorical imperative.

Or, at least, so it seems on first acquaintance. The command of duty, addressed to the sensuously-conditioned nature, brooks no opposition and condescends to no reasons in explanation or promises by way of attraction. The moral law claims unconditional authority: towards its sublime aspect reverence and sheer obeisance is due, utter loyalty to duty for duty's sake. Nothing short of this absolute identification with the Ought and a willingly willed self-surrender of the whole self to it can entitle an agent to the full rank of moral goodness. Such is the form—the synthetic link which joins the sensuous will indissolubly with the will reasonableof moral law. Now for its explanation. Humanity, though in the world of appearance and experience always subject to sensuous conditions, is also a power of transcending these conditions. Man is more than he can ever show in visibly single act. He has in him the hope, the faith, the vision of absolute perfection and completeness: but has it not as positive attained vision, but as the perpetual unrest of unsatisfied endeavour, as the feeling and the anticipation of an unachieved idea. And that perfection, that completeness he believes himself to be; he even in some sense is. Lapses and ill-success cannot quench the faith: for so long as there is life, there is hope.

As he pictures out this invisible self, it may assume various forms more or less imaginative. At times it may seem a far away, and yet intimately near, being of beings,—the common father of all souls, the eternal self-existent centre of life and love, the omnipresent bond of nature, the omniscient heart of hearts,—on whom he can lean in closest communion; though he is only too well aware how often he lives as if God were not, and human beings were roaming specks in chaos. At other times, he looks up to it as to an inner and better self, his conscience, the true and permanent being, which controls his choices and avoidances, which approves and disapproves, commands and condemns: his soul of soul, genius, and guardian spirit. In such a mood to be true to his own self—to follow the very voice of his nature—is to realise his law of life. His Ego is the absolute ego—the reason which is all things. And lastly, there are times when he conceives this better self and true essence as the community of the faithful, as the congregation of reasonable beings, of all perfected humanity.

In Kantian phraseology, man under one visible formis the union of an intelligence and a sensibility, of a noümenal with a phenomenal being. He is, indeed, says Kant, the former only in idea: it is only a standpoint which he assumes. But it is a standpoint he always does assume, if he is to be practical, i. e. if he is to move and modify the world he finds around him. And what standpoint is that? What is the law that has to govern his action, the law of the spiritual world? Its supreme law is the law of liberty; and that law is autonomy. Action—always under law—but that law a self-imposed one. So act that thy will may be thy law, and with thy will the law of all others whatsoever; so act that no other human being may by thy act be deprived of full freedom and treated merely as a thing: so act as to respect the dignity of every human being as implicitly a sovereign legislative. In other words, Morality is a stage of struggle and of progress which bears witness to something beyond. The 'I ought' represents a transition stage towards the 'I will,' or rather it is the translation of it into the language of the phenomenal world.[3]Morality, in a sense-being, always presents itself as a contest between the good and the evil principle: but in the transcendent and noümenal being which such a being essentially is,—in the reasonable or good will, the victory is already won by the good. Good is the law which governs the world, and which is the strength of the individual life. To the sensuous imagination, indeed, which here is apt to usurp the place of reason, things appear under a somewhat different aspect. There the certainty of self-conquest is forced by the difficulties of apparent failure to veil itself under the picture of a perpetual approximation through endless ages towards the standardof perfect goodness: the confidence that the world is reasonable is presented under the conception of a God who makes all things work together for good to the righteous: and the autonomy of reason presents itself as the postulate of freedom to begin afresh, absolutely untrammeled by all that has gone before. Thus the kingdom of reason is represented as having its times and seasons; as making determinate starts, and working up to a consummation in the end of ages. But implicitly Kant's idea of reason's autonomy,—of the 'I ought' as in its supreme truth an 'I will,'—is an eternal truth. The 'standpoint,' so to call it after Kant, is the standpoint which explains life and conduct and which makes conduct possible. It is the assertion that the completenessis,and is my inmost being, the source of my action, my chief good, and that chief good not a gratification or satisfaction to be looked forward to as reward, but essential life and self-realisation. And this joy is what is hidden under the austere gravity of the categorical imperative.

The Criticism of the Judgment-faculty is Kant's next step towards providing a completer philosophy. Ostensibly it owes its origin to the need of supplementing the treatment of Understanding and Reason by a discussion of Judgment, and of considering our emotional as well as our cognitive and volitional appreciations. What it really does is to minimise still further the gulf left between the intellect and nature—between the natural and the spiritual world. The intellect, said the first criticism, makes nature: it makes possible the general outlines of our conception of the world around us as a causally-connected system, in which a permanent being undergoes perpetual alteration, and manifests phenomena subject to mathematical conditions. Intellect, in short, has staked out the world which is theobject of the practical man, and of his adviser the scientist. But there is another world—the world of beauty and sublimity—the world which art imitates and realises. The interpretation Kant gives to the aesthetic world is as follows. The fact of beauty is a witness to the presence in the mere copiousness of sensible existence of a sub-conscious symmetry or spirit of harmony which realises without compulsion and as if by free grace all the proportion and coherence which intellect requires. Nature itself has something which does the work that intellect was charged with, and does it with a subtle secret hand which does not suggest the artificer. The fact of sublimity, on the other hand, indicates the presence of an even greater spirit. For beauty may seem—from what has been said—to be only an unbought accrement to the commodities of life—facilitating the task of the practical intellect. But the sublime in nature speaks of something which is greater than human utilities and practical conveniences. It reveals a something which is in sympathy with our essential and higher self, and therefore stirs within us the keen rapture of the traveller who sees from afar his home in 'rocky Ithaca,' but a something which is cold to daily wants and vulgar satisfactions, and therefore strikes upon us a gelid awe.

Another world yet remains, which appeals neither to our utilitarian science, nor to our higher sentiments of artistic perfection. This is the world as the home of organic life, and perhaps itself an organism. The organism is apt to be a poser for the ordinary categories of mechanical science. Here the part contains the whole, not less than the whole contains the part: the cause is an effect, as well as cause, of its effect. One thing is in another, and the other in it: 'thepresent is charged with the past, and pregnant of the future,'—as the great founder of modern teleology often said. In the plant and the animal the natural world has to a certain degree reached an ideal unity which is also real. Reason—the syllogism—is here not merely introduced from without, as when man manipulates, but is the immanent law of a natural life,—the end working out itself by its own means and act. The fact admitted in these creatures suggests extending the conception of organism (or teleology) to nature as a whole. From this point of view Nature may almost be said to have a history—because it is almost conceived as having one abiding self which in apparent unconsciousness wonderfully simulates the purposive adaptation of conscious life. The older vulgar teleology was somewhat mechanical: it regarded the natural world outside of—or as it said, below—man as having no end of its own, but in its series subserving man's commodities. In the teleology of Kant the supreme end is still in a way man, and still there is a little of the mechanical about it: but it is not to promote man's happiness, understood as that probablymustbe in a selfish sense, but to produce in him the worthiest agent to carry on to its highest the rational process of development. The struggles and pains of natural existence, the laws of life, the competition of rivals, are all means in the hands of nature to produce an autonomous being. Kant says, a moral agent. But a moral agent has been already explained as an intelligence certified unto truth and a self-centred will whose law is the law of the cosmos,—whose plan of life, if we so put of it, is essentially a concentration in miniature and in individuality of the system ordained by the all-present God.

It is true that Kant, after all these soarings, checksenthusiasm by the words 'not that we can know this, or that it is so: but our nature with unmistakable tendency bids us actas ifit were so. Logic will hardly justify it—but life seems to demand it.' And some have replied: 'let us trust the larger hope.'

[1]Hegel'sWerke, vol. i. p. 140.

[2]Kant from 1762 onwards continues to insist on the necessity for philosophy taking up an analytic and critical attitude to current conceptions: see especiallyWerke,i. 95 and 292.

[3]Foundation of Metaph. of Eth. (Werke, viii. 82, 89): 'Dieses Sollen ist eigentlich ein Wollen.'

To get the full effect of a new doctrine it must be brought into contact with a mind unshackled by those traditional prepossessions which clung to its original author. Kant, essentially by training a man of the school, was by heart and character essentially a seeker after the wider ends of the larger world. His lesson is on one hand the scholar's disproof of pretended science, and on another an appeal and an example to the mere scholar to make his philosophy ample for the whole life, and co-extensive with the whole field of reality. His first disciples who stand forward as teachers caught only the first part of his message, and sought to set theoretical philosophy on a sounder basis. Johann Gottlieb Fichte—perhaps the least professional of great philosophical professors—with a resolute will, a passion for logical thoroughness, and great impulse to force mankind to be free and to realise liberty in an institution—was the first who really grappled with the searching questions that arose out of Kant's message to his age. His was a Kantism, not certainly always of the letter, nor indeed always of the spirit: yet for all that, there was substantial justice in his claim that his system supplied the presupposition which gives meaning and interconnexion to Kant's utterances[1]. It is, saysthe proverb, the first step that costs. And Fichte took that step. Before his impetuosity the cautelous clauses which besmirched the great purpose of Criticism shrunk away, the central truth was disengaged from its old-fashioned swaddling clothes, and openly announced itself as a renovating, almost a revolutionary principle.

But, as was to be expected, the unity and force are paid for by a considerable surrender of catholicity. If Kant's utterances are fused into comparative simplicity, the unification does not embrace the whole of the Kantian gospels. What Fichte did in his earlier stage—the stage by which he counts in the history of philosophy—was to emphasise and exhibit in his systematic statement that priority or supremacy of the 'practical' over the 'theoretical' reason which Kant had enunciated, and to put in the very foreground that self or Ego which Kant had indicated, under the title of 'transcendental unity of apperception,' as the focus which gives coherence and objectivity to experience. But to put the final presupposition at the head and front of all, as a principle originating and governing the whole line of procedure, is really to modify in a thorough-going way the whole aspect of a doctrine and its inner constitution. Kant's way is quiet analysis: from the given, or what is supposed given, up regressively to its final presuppositions, its latentprius.He shows you the thing is so, apparently without effort, by judicious application of the proper re-agent, as it were. Fichte, on the contrary, pours forth a strong current of deduction: Let it be assumed that so and so is, thenmust,or then shall, something else be; and so onwards. Instead of a glance at the secret substructure of the world, you see it, at a magician's mandate, building itself up; stone calling to stone, and beam to beam, to fill up the gaps and bind the walls together. And youmust not merely read or listen. You are summoned as a partner in the work; a work the author feels, only half-consciously, he has not yet quite accomplished, and where therefore he complains of the bystander's dullness.

This, one may say, was a new conception, certainly a new practice, of philosophy. Kant had indeed hinted that the pupil in philosophy must 'symphilosophise'; but practically, even his aim had been to describe or narrate a process of thought with such quasi-historical vividness and detail that the listener was sympathetically carried through the succession of ideas which were called up before him. What had been generally given in philosophical literature was a sort of historical account of how thoughts happened: a succession of pictures presented with the interposition here and there of a little reasoning, expository of connexions. You enlisted your reader's sympathy: you set his imagination to work by translating the logical process into a historical event—theLogosinto aMythos—and blending with your narrative a little explanation as to general drift and relations, you left him to himself to enjoy theTheoria.The nearest approach Fichte makes to this polite and easy method is in the 'Sun-clear Statement,' where he, as he says, attempts to 'forcethe reader to understand' him. But probably these things cannot be forced. And for the rest Fichte's characteristic attitude is to request, or command, his reader (or pupil) to think with him, to put himself in the posture required, to perform the act of thought described. He has not merely to be present at the lecture, but personally to perform the experiment. It is not a mere story to be heard and admired and forgotten.De teO pupil!fabula narratur.If it be a play, you are the actor as well as the onlooker: and the play is not a play, but the drama—the nameless drama—of the soultransacted in the unseen sub-conscious depths which bear up its visible life.

You do not therefore begin by getting a fact put before you. Yourfact,in philosophy, must be your ownact: not something done and dead, passive, a thing, but something doing, alive, active: your introspection must be, let us say, an experiment in the growing, responsive, quick life, not anatomy of the merecadaver.Think, therefore, and catch yourself in the act of thinking. Get something before your mind's eye, and see what it involves. It matters not what you perceive or feel: only realise it fully and penetrate its meaning and implications. It is of course the perception of something here and now. And you would be, in ordinary life, eager to get on to something else—to associate the present fact to something perceived elsewhere, to draw conclusions about things yet to come. But if you philosophise, you must check this practical-minded impatience and concede yourself leisure to ponder deeply all that the single perception involves. Be content to sit awhile with Mary, by the side of Rachel of old. Let Martha bustle about. Fichte tells you that your perception rests,—and you, youseethat it rests, on the 'I am that I am,'—on the I = I, i. e. on the continuity, identity, and unity of the percipient self. Make the statement of what you perceive, believe it, that is, assert it: and you have—done what? You have pledged your whole self—falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus—to its truth: its background is your whole and one mental life. And is that all? You have also called the world to witness: your statement—if, as it professes, it form an item however slight in the realm of knowledge—requests and expects every other 'I' to acknowledge your perception. Your certainty of the fact rests on the certainty of your self: and your self isa self certified by its ever-postulated identity with other selves, so onad infinitum. In affirming this (whatever be your statement) you affirm the Absolute Infinite Ego. Heaven and earth are at stake in every jot and tittle[2].

At which plain frankness there was much cachinnation and even muttering among the baser sort. Even wiser heads forgot—if they ever knew—that Leibniz a century before had startled the world of his day by a view that 'the Ego or something like it[3]was, under the name ofmonad, the presupposition of each and every detail of existence in any organic total. It was useless for Fichte to repeat[4]that his philosophical Ego was not the empirical or individual ego which he in this every-day world had to provide clothes and company for. It is hard to persuade the world that it does not know that 'I am I,' and what that means. Later, therefore, Fichte, going along with the movement of contemporary speculation, and willing to avoid one source of confusion, tended to keep off the name of Ego from the absolute basis of all knowledge and experienced reality. But unquestionably the absolutising of the Ego is the characteristic note of his first period in philosophy: and it rings with the spirit of the heaven-storming Titan. It means that the cardinal principle and foundation of man's conscious moral and intellectual life is identical with the principle of the Universe, even if the Universe seem not to know it. It means that self-consciousness—the certainty that I am I and one in all my manifestations—is the highest word yet uttered. In, or under, the surface of human knowledge and belief in reality, there is a transcendental Ego—a self identical with all other selves,—infinite, unlimited, unconditional, absolute. The certainty of human knowledge—and therefore of all reality in consciousness—is the Absolute,—an absolute certainty and knowledge—but an absolute with which I identify myself,—which I am, and which is me. This is the absolutethesis—the nerve and utter basis-laying—at the ground, or rather under the ground, of all I know, feel, and will.

This, then, is the thesis at the very foundation of allWissenschaft: and therefore figures at the head of theWissenschaftslehre,—the name Fichte gives his fundamental philosophy. But alone it is powerless. A foundation is only a foundation, by being built upon. The position must be defined by counterposition: thesis by antithesis: ego by non-ego. Ego, in fact, is first madesuch, as set againstyou.In other words, the perception we assumed to start with does not merelysupposeand indeed pre-suppose the absolute Ego; but it sets in the absolute Ego an ego and a non-ego,—sets against the lesser ego, something limiting and limited, something defining it in one particular direction; or, if the original consciousness we started to examine was an act of will, then, it may be said, the non-ego appears as about to be limited and defined by the Ego. Be our consciousness, therefore, practical or theoretical, of action or of knowledge, its fundamental characteristic is the conjunction (correlation with subjugation) of an ego and a non-ego. It is always a synthesis of an original antithesis[5]; of self and not-self. But everysuch synthesis which brings together into one a self and a not-self, is possible only in the original thesis of a greater self—an absolute Ego—which includes the not-self and the self it contrasts within its larger self. The unity of the first principle[6](A = A, or I = I) parting or distinguishing itself into the opposition of A versus not-A, Ego set against non-ego, re-asserts itself again in consciousness (perception of objects, and action upon them by will) as synthesis, i. e. a conjunction (not a real union). And this synthesis is either the limitation of the Ego by the non-ego or the limitation of the non-ego by the Ego. The former gives the formula of theoretical, the latter that of practical consciousness.

We begin with the absolute Ego. It is absolute activity, utter freedom. It is the source of all action, all life. Yet if thus implicitly everything, it is actually nothing. To be something, it must restrict itself, set up in itself an antithesis:—by the setting up of a not-self, at once limit and realise itself: translate itself from ideal absoluteness and unconditionality into a reality which is also limited and partial. All consciousness and action exhibit this antithesis of a limited self and an outside and adversative other-being; but the antithesis rests upon the medium of a larger life, a thesis which transcends and includes the antithesis, and which leads to that alternating adaptation of the two sides to one another (their synthesis) which actual experience presents as its recurring phase[7]. TheWissenschaftslehreleaving the absolute Ego in the background deals with the play that goes on in human experience between the correlatives to which it has reduced itself;—the antagonism, but the moderated and overruled antagonism, of Ego and non-ego.

Observe the contrast to the ordinary methods of expression. Popular language—if the popular philosophers are to be trusted as its exponents—says 'an impression is produced by an external object on the senses, and causes an idea in the mind.' The 'object' works a series of marvellous effects on a mind, which—to begin with—is hardly describable as anything more than an imagined point of resistance, getting reality by being repeatedly impinged upon.[8]Fichte's statements are rather interpreters of the vulgar phrases, which say 'I hear, I see';—as if, forsooth, the 'I' did it all. According to Fichte, the 'I,'—the absolute 'I,' is the real (but secret) source of the position in which consciousness finds itself limited by a non-ego. But within the finite ego and its consciousness there is no reminiscence or awareness of this its great co-partner's—the absolute ego's—act. For the finite consciousness, the beginning of its activity—i. e. of all empirical consciousness, lies in an impulse or stimulus from without—a mere somewhat of which we can predicate the very minimum of attributes. It is onlyfeltas opposing: and this is the first stage or grade of theoretical consciousness: Sensation. But in the perpetual antithesis—in the self-opposition which is the radical act of consciousness—the mere limitation of Ego by non-Ego is confronted by the underlying activity of the Ego which re-asserts the limitation as its own act. Thus while we are, as it were, impressed, we re-act against that impression—we set it forth before us, as ours, and free ourselvesfrom its immediate incumbency and oppression. Instead of mere sentiency or feeling, we have a perception (or intuition) of it.

It would be out of place, here, to try to write the interpretation of that marvellous and difficult piece of dialectic—theWissenschaftslehre;—a theme to which Fichte returned again and again up to his death, ever modifying details, selecting new modes of exposition, and gradually, perhaps, changing the centre of gravity of his system. It will be sufficient to note the two purposes which it keeps in view. On the one hand it is a systematic theory of the categories. It begins, as we have seen, with the three co-ordinates of all reflection,—identity, difference, and reason why; it proceeds to the co-relative principles of activity and passivity; to condition, quantity, &c. And its work is to show how these forms naturally emerge in the recurrent antithesis which arises in consciousness, and how again they are brought together by the overmastering Absolute thesis into a synthesis, from which the same process re-appears. How much this corresponds in general conception to the Hegelian Logic is obvious, and Fichte has the merit of the original suggestion. With this however he conjoins—what Hegel has relegated to his Psychology—an evolutional or developmental theory of the mental powers. We have already seen how sensation is forced by the latent intelligence to rise into perception (Anschauung): the line of psychological development is carried on by Fichte through imagination to understanding and reason. Hegel's work is far more complete, definite, and detailed: but that need not keep us from giving due homage to the suggestive sketch of the originator of the conception[9].

But the theoretical consciousness is not all; and as we already know, the practical Ego is supreme over it. In it lies the key to the mystery of the stimulus—the shock from the unknown—which awakened the activity of the Ego. The non-ego is only a mass of resistance created by the Ego so that it may be active; only a stepping-stone on which it may walk; a spring-board from which it may bound. Only so much reality has the non-ego; the reality of something which may be shaped, made, made use of. Call the something which the stimulus (Anstoss) pre-supposes, the thing-in-itself (after Kant): and if you ask How are things-in-themselves constituted, you get from theWissenschaftslehrethe answer: 'They are as we should make them[10],' Or, as it is said in another place: 'My world is—object and sphere of my duties and absolutely nothing else[11]:' if you ask whether there is really such a world, the only sound reply I can give is: 'I have certainly and truthfully these definite duties, which take the form of dutiestowardssuch, andinsuch, objects; and it is only in a world such as I there represent and not elsewhere that I can perform these duties which I cannot conceive otherwise,'

This is a grand word: and yet we feel that, in the intensity of intellectual consecutiveness and moral inflexibleness, we have lost some elements to which Kant had given their place in the philosophy of life. The third of Kant's three Criticisms is conspicuous by its absence from the Fichtean field of view, and has no recognition in this scheme of the universe: and thegreat conception of the natural world as an organism, in which natural man is only a part, and all is controlled by an autonomous principle of life, has been for the while allowed to drop. Even more than in Kant religion tends to be an epilogue or appendix to morality: and God is identified with the moral order of the world. It is customary to speak of Fichte's idealism as ethical, or as subjective: and so long as these words are understood, no harm is done. But to call it subjective does not mean that Fichte was so far beside himself as to believe the world was only a picture or a function of his individual brain. It means that he throws the weight too much on the side of subjectivity. The Absolute is, for him in his first stage, described as an Absolute Ego—and thereby the natural world seems to be left without God: and subjective duty has too exclusively thrown on it the weight of certifying objective existence. The world, as we shall see, and have indeed indirectly gathered from Kant, is too good and worthy to be the mere block of stone out of which our duties are to be hewn. And similarly, to call Fichte an ethical idealist is only to name him right, when we add that his were idealist ethics. The world is not here merely that social decorum may be maintained, and that puritanical virtue may pronounce that all is so well, that thenceforth there shall be no cakes and ale, nor ginger be hot in the mouth. The friend of the two brothers Schlegel, and their remarkable wives, Dorothea and Caroline, touched hands with a social group[12]which, for good and for ill, had emancipated itself from all codes except that which bids

'To thine own self be true:Thou canst not then be false to any man.'

To him, as to Kant, morality presented itself as autonomy, as the dignity and grace of human nature in freest development; but to him, more than to Kant, there commended itself the ideal of a city of reason, a thoroughly socialised community[13], in which the welfare of each would be an obligation on all, and the machinery of government would be so marvellously self-corrective that all would do right and all fare well.

Fichte's place in the annals of philosophy depends on his academic treatises of 1794-98, and on his more popular works from the first date down to 1808. In a study of the philosopher as a whole it would be necessary to go beyond these dates, and take account of the displacement which a development of thought, which there is no good reason to suppose other than gradual, made in the scale of his earlier views. But for our purposes that is out of the question. In justice, however, it must be added that some things that seem inadequately treated, some shortcomings in catholicity of mind, would appear in another light if the later writings—not published till after Hegel's death—were duly taken into account. But even at the close of the century the advancing thought of Germany was seeking other leaders.

[1]Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 399.

[2]Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 387.

[3]Leibniz,Werke,ed. Gerhardt, iv. p. 392.

[4]Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 393.

[5]Theantithesishas two members: the partial ego, and the non-ego, which confronts. Thesynthesisis a putting together two separate things, so as to correlate them; but it falls short of what would be understood in some present usage by 'synthetic unity' which has a certain mystical ring. It is important for a student of Schelling or Hegel to remember this distinction of synthesis from 'absolute unity e.g. Schelling,Werke, v. 43.

[6]A = Ais the more purely logical formula:I=Ipresents it as a personal and metaphysical identity. TheA, which is-A,is to be distinguished from theAwhich is opposed tonot-A.But it is Fichte's standpoint to insist on their being one Ego.

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