Charles Carroll Everett

“ It may be interesting to call attention to certain aspects of Fichte’s view of the world that made it attractive from the point of view of religion. If it lost the help that comes from the a posteriori argument, it escaped the difficulties that are involved in this. The world is the projection of human spirits, and represents the stage which they have reached. God is practically recognized as an ideal, and may thus be seen in absolute beauty and completeness. One can doubt His reality and His perfection no more than one can doubt his own being. ”

“ It does not involve consciousness. To the very close of his philosophical work, Fichte insisted that for consciousness there must be limitation; but this absolute knowledge has no limit, and thus no consciousness. Not only has it no consciousness; it has no power of activity—for action, no less than consciousness, implies duality.
The second of the schemata under which the Absolute Being finds its manifestation, is that by which, alone, activity and consciousness can be attained. This is Life. It, is spoken of as an endless stream which concentrates itself into points of consciousness. ”

“ It is taken as the best word which our human speech can offer for that which it cannot fully name. This Eternal Will manifests itself in the will of the individual, so far as this chooses the highest. ”

“ The ideal to which the soul aspires is infinite. So soon as one form has been attained, another and higher takes its place. In the fact of its impulse to attain to this ideal, the spirit finds the pledge of its own immortality. ”

“ To this Absolute Fichte gives the name of God, when he uses this name in its highest and most distinctive sense. He still speaks, however, of life in that knowledge which forms the Divine existence, as life in God. The relation between knowledge—which is the form of the Divine existence—and the Absolute Being, is thus expressed in The Way to the Blessed Life: “The real life of knowledge is therefore in its root, the inner being and essence of the Absolute itself; and there is between the Absolute, or God, and knowledge, in the deepest root of its life, no difference ”

“ The Absolute, in the strict sense of the word, must be regarded as a perfect unity. Knowledge involves, by its very nature, a dualism. Knowledge implies both subject and object, even although these may not be consciously separated. If we regard our own consciousness as representing, in a concrete form, the knowledge of which Fichte speaks, the point under consideration will become clear. In consciousness we have two elements, the I and the Me. ”

“ It is at once the universal and the individual. It is one of the points of concentration at which the Absolute Life becomes conscious of itself. Its being is, then, at heart, this Absolute Life, of which it is a manifestation. We understand now something of the nature of that limit which suggests to the I, whose activity impinges upon it, the thought of the Not-me. We see now that Fichte had a definite meaning when he said that this might be only a limit. If the Absolute Life concentrates itself into a point of consciousness, this concentration implies a limit. ”

“ In this development every individual has his place. Each has a special duty and a special ideal. If he fulfils these, then he will at last have learned the lesson of this world, and will be introduced into another and a higher; and thus shall he press on from world to world in an endless progress. If he fails of his duty, he drops out of the grand movement, and others take his place.
The power working through this grand progress of the individual and of the race, Fichte calls the Divine and Eternal Will. ”

“ This life, in order to attain to complete self-consciousness, requires not only the subjective element manifested in these points of concentration; it needs, also, an objective element. It must manifest itself to itself. ”

“ These truths are the expression of the Absolute Life, which forms the essence of all individual life. Since, however, this Absolute Life is a life, it will manifest itself chiefly under the form of activity. It will be not so much something to be believed, as something to be done. ”

“ There is no reality but thought, and that which is involved in the very fact of thought itself. Although the phraseology of the system sometimes resembles that of Spinoza, the difference between Fichte and Spinoza is as wide as ever, and every criticism upon Spinoza, in Fichte’s earlier works, would be wholly in place in these later ones. ”

“ At the same time, it is affirmed, from the beginning, that it is by the Divine Life within it that the spirit presses on toward the Divine Ideal. In regard to this impulse within us, there can be as little doubt as in regard to the ideal toward which it points. God is thus recognized as the most certain of realities. ”

“ The fact that the objects that make up our world are merely appearances created by our own imagination, does not, Fichte is careful to insist, make of them illusions. He objects to Kant’s use of this term. They would be illusions if there were anything more real with which to com ware them. As it is, they are the ultimate reality, and thus may be truly accepted as such. ”

“ The limit exists by the very act of concentration. We see now how it is possible that this limit should become enlarged; and whence comes the content of the endless life that shall fill out the expanding limit into infinitude. ”