Charles Carroll Everett

“ Fichte, at one time, hoped to apply his system to aesthetics; but his nature was too ethical and active to feel much real attraction in that direction. He looks at this matter as at all others, from the ethical standpoint. Beauty, in his view, is the manifestation of the ideal in nature; and the ideal belongs to the inner life of the spirit. Thus in the contemplation of beauty, the limitations of the material and the sensuous are broken through, and the spirit returns to itself. The enjoyment of beauty is thus not virtue—it is the preparation for virtue ”

“ We cannot think unity, and we cannot think variety. We can think both together, unity in variety and variety in unity. In other words, each thought is a unit; but it is a complex and organic unity. It contains elements distinct, yet united. The self is the type of this organic unity, as indeed it is that which creates this organic unity in thought. Notwithstanding the fact which we have just considered is one so universally present in our consciousness, being indeed our consciousness itself, it strikes many either as something marvellous or as something absurd. ”

“ I demand morality—that is to say, rationality or independence—absolutely. Whether this end is reached within me, or outside of me, is a matter of indifference. The end of my being is accomplished as truly when others act morally, as when I act morally.
Elsewhere in the same treatise, The System of Ethics, Fichte speaks of the end toward which the impulse to independence is ever working, as the complete annihilation of the individual, and its absorption into the pure form of rationality, or into God. ”

“ THE MORAL LAW AND ITS CONTENT. The fundamental discord that needs to be solved is that between the impulse, or longing, on the one hand, and the act by which it seeks to express itself, upon the other. The highest manifestation of this tendency to activity is that in which the impulse is to no special thing for any promised gain, but merely for its own sake. It is a striving that has no other end than itself; an absolute striving. This is what Kant described as the Categorical Imperative. It is an absolute law, an absolute must. ”

“ He had chosen for the medium of his utterance a system of terminology which was largely regarded as ridiculous, as well as meaningless; and the high spirit of Fichte was stung by the ridicule, and was lonely in its isolation. Now, at last, the constraint and the disguise were thrown away. He stood a man among men. He stood a leader of men. The heart of the nation thrilled at his words. A century after his birth, although his philosophy was a sealed book to many of the scholars of Germany, the German people united in a tribute to his memory. ”

“ It is causality which does not attain to causality. If it were not causality, it would produce no effect, even upon the consciousness. It would be nothing. But if it actually attained to causality—that is, if it fulfilled its nature—it would be not a striving, but an accomplishment. We strive to do that which we, at least as yet, find ourselves unable to accomplish. The striving that is here spoken of is absolutely such. It is an infinite striving—that is, it can never become transformed to an accomplishment. That which is the object of the effort is infinite. ”

“ I think that nothing contributes more to the first disturbance of our confidence in the reality of the world about us, than the first noticing that one hears the sound of the distant woodsman’s axe, while the axe is rising. This disassociation of elements that seemed inseparable, affects us something as does an occasional tremor in the scenery of the stage. The illusion is for the moment broken. A closer analysis brings to view the fact that light and color are sensations of our own, and thus can, as such, have no external existence. ”

“ The imagination hovers between object and no object. It is fixed to have no object. That is, the imagination, which is regarded as the creator of the objects that fill our consciousness, is wholly suppressed; and this suppression, this non-existence of the imagination, becomes itself the object of a vague consciousness. The dim notion that we have, when for the sake of pure thought we try to abstract from all mingling of the imagination, is something that is not unfamiliar to the thinker. This product must be fixed, like all others, in the understanding. ”

“ What it is, cannot be learned by experience, for absolute freedom is a goal rather than a fact—a goal which we may forever approach, but which we may never reach. It is a goal which the spirit has set for itself. ”

“ Would it seem too bold to suggest that this result may have been more easy because Kant received the fundamental position of his system from without? It was Hume who reached the conception of a purely idealistic view of the universe. It was he who considered the processes of the mind as complete in themselves; in whose system we find no hint of any influence from the world outside the mind, nor any hint of a permanent ego behind the mind. This was with him an original thought, and the clearness of its utterance satisfies entirely the claim that Fichte makes for such originality. ”

“ If we have done what the law forbids, we have the reproach of conscience, which reveals to us the fact that we have done wrong. If our act is in conformity to the law, we have a sense of peace, which perhaps is the first intimation that we have done right. Thus it is the act that has given a content to the law, while it was freely seeking to conform itself to the law. Thus, the problem that seemed to admit of no solution is solved. The law, through the act itself, determines the act. The act is now known to be right or wrong, through the evidence which its very existence has brought with it ”

“ Not only our common habit of thought, but even the system of Kant, tends to suggest a false explanation of it. By a moral ordering of the universe we might naturally understand that relation of things by which, in Kant’s phrase, happiness is made proportionate to well-doing. It would be, then, an ordering by which poetic justice is rendered to all; the wicked are punished, and the good rewarded. Nothing could be farther from the thought of Fichte. With him, morality is severed from all that is foreign to it. It is not designed to minister to happiness. It is its own end ”

“ The infinite, as such, can no more be perceived than it can perceive. This life must, therefore, manifest itself by degrees and piecemeal. It must exist under the form of time. Time is the unrolling of the panorama of endless existence. In this process of life, each individual has his place, and thus his special work, in relation to the great whole.
We have thus presented two schemata; knowledge, and knowledge of knowledge, which is consciousness. ”

“ This activity is called Imagination. [3]
The imagination fills with Fichte the same place that it does with Kant, and which it must till in any idealistic philosophy. In every such philosophy, the world of objects, in the midst of which we seem to live, is a world of phenomena, or of appearances. We have only sensations of various kinds. It is the imagination that creates, out of these, the full and rounded world of our daily life. The relation in which the imagination stands to the Me and the Not-me in their relation to one another, is obvious. They are its creation. ”

“ Thus is seen the whole work of the imagination in perception. The pause in its vibration, leaving the opposing forces in equipoise, furnishes the basis or material of the objects of perception, while its productive activity gives to them their form.
We have now, even at the cost of some repetition, to make more distinct the manner in which the objects of perception obtain the appearance of externality. All that we have seen has taken place within the mind itself. It is, however, regarded as opening to the thought a world which lies outside of the mind. ”

“ That the I should become absolute, implies that it should become one with the Absolute. It would then, as we have seen, cease to be an I. The absolute I is a contradiction in terms; it is something that has never been and will never be. It is. however, none the less the ideal which should be the aim and the inspiration of every life, and a life is glad and triumphant as it draws near to this. This approach is indeed in appearance only. The goal flees as we approach it. It is always, and through eternity will always be, infinitely in advance of the most earnest seeker. ”

“ Our right to affirm reality cannot be derived from anything else. All else must be derived from it. In other words, what we recognize as the ultimate reality cannot be shown to be such by any argument. If we undertake to prove the fact of this ultimate reality, we must appeal to something that we regard as more real than it. Herbert Spencer recognizes this very clearly in his affirmation of the existence of something real outside of us. ”

“ It will be seen how close this comes to the position of Schopenhauer in regard to happiness; namely, that what we call happiness consists only in the removal of pain; that it becomes less, the more the discomfort is lessened, and ceases when the discomfort ceases. How sweet is water to one tormented by thirst! How insipid when the thirst disappears! Happiness thus always nestles in the bosom of unhappiness; it can, therefore, never be positive. ”

“ Various grave objections are urged against the speculative method of thought. It is urged that we cannot reach, thereby, concrete realities. These must in every case be given. When the philosopher seems to have reached by his deduction anything of a nature at all concrete, let it be even the Faculties of the Mind or the Categories of Thought, these are in fact accepted by him as given. They are really the products of experience. Further, it is urged that no real unity is attained by this process, but only the semblance of unity. ”

“ We may now see how mistaken is the impression which one would receive from a superficial examination of these earlier statements of the system of Fichte. We might, at the first glance, suspect that his eagerness for independence sprang from the influence received by him in his youth, from the French Revolution. We have seen how far the independence of which Fichte speaks, is from the Revolutionists’ dream of liberty. It is an independence that is one with self-surrender. The individuality with which we start becomes transformed to a universality in which all have their place. ”

“ In this finite will, the Absolute Will comes to a consciousness of itself. This higher Will manifests itself, indeed, in every act of the individual will; for action, so far as it goes, is life; only it is life that has not yet reached the absoluteness that belongs to it. This Infinite Will, and these finite wills in which it is embodied, furnish all the reality that there is in the world of existence. All things else are appearances that offer occasion or scope for the manifestation of this Will. ”

“ The I feels its limit because it presses beyond it; and it presses beyond the limit because it divines something to which it has not yet fully attained. For these results, are needed different forms of activity that can be compared between themselves, and some basis or standard for this comparison. In order to make the discussion more easily understood, we should, perhaps, define more carefully the terms used. We have to ask, then, What is meant by the limit with which the I finds itself confronted? The limit is the world of objects within which the soul seems to be inclosed. ”

“ What has been said suggests the kind of unity which philosophy may reach. It may at least reach the unity of the Idea. Thought, like spirit, involves in its very nature the coexistence, even the identification, of two elements that under all other forms are mutually exclusive; namely, Unity and Diversity. So far as the real may be regarded as the ideal, so far may it be regarded under the form of unity; and, since it is the nature of the mind to think, it cannot rest till it represents to itself all things under the form of thought; that is, till the real has become the ideal. ”