Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ How can education estimate and guarantee that this knowledge of religion will not remain dead and cold, but will be expressed in the actual life of the pupil? The premise of this question is the answer to another: How, and in what manner, is religion shown in life?
In everyday life, and in a well-ordered community, there is no need whatever of religion to regulate life. True morality suffices wholly for that purpose. In this respect, therefore, religion is not practical, and cannot and shall not become practical. Religion is simply knowledge ”

“ As the result of this education, therefore, a totally new order of things and a new creation would begin. Now, in this new form, mankind would fashion itself by means of itself, for mankind considered as the present generation educates itself as the future generation; and mankind can do this only by means of knowledge, the one common true light and air of this world which can be freely imparted and which binds the spiritual world into a unity. Formerly mankind became just what it did become and was able to become; the time for such chance development has gone by ”

“ This mental training, however, though acquired but incidentally, remains an ineradicable possession of the pupil’s life and the ever-burning lamp of his moral love. However great or small the total knowledge which he may have obtained from education, he will certainly have brought away from it a mind which, during the whole of his life, will be able to grasp every truth, the knowledge of which is essential to him, and which will remain continually susceptible to instruction from others, as well as capable of reflecting for itself. ”

“ The direct appearance and manifestation of God is love. The interpretation of this love by knowledge first fixes an existence, an existence that ever is to be; this is the only real world, in so far as a world can be real. The other world, on the contrary, which is given and found existing by us, is but the shadow and phantom, out of which knowledge builds up for its interpretation of love a fixed form and a visible body. This other world is the means for, and the condition of, the perception of the higher world that is in itself invisible. ”

“ We put forward as the fundamental assumption of the new education that there is at the root of man’s nature a pure pleasure in the good, which can be developed to such an extent that it becomes impossible for him to leave undone what he knows to be good and to do instead what he knows to be evil. The existing education, on the other hand, has not only assumed, but has also taught its pupils from early youth onwards, that man has a natural aversion from God’s commandments, and, further, that it is absolutely impossible for him to keep them. ”

“ Rather must this impulse be developed still further and introduced into higher spheres, so that when the Nothing has been revealed, the Something, the positive truth that sets up something real, may likewise become manifest. The world of given and self-forming existence, which arises from dim feeling, has been submerged and shall remain below the surface. The world, however, which arises from original clearness, the world of existence that is ever to be evolved from the mind, shall dawn and shine forth in its splendour. ”

“ On the other hand, we regard that nature of things which can be learned only from history as an insignificant accessory that follows of itself. When we do all this, then the ripest products of the old education oppose us, reminding us that it is well known there is no a priori knowledge, and saying they would like to know how there can be any knowledge except through experience. ”

“ Such a case is not the concern of an education intended for everyone and for the whole nation. When, as in the former case, work is continued unceasingly, although man’s understanding has a clear perception of the incorrigibility of the age; when the toil of sowing is courageously borne without any prospect of harvest; when good is done even to the ungrateful, and those who curse are blessed with deeds and gifts, although it is clearly foreseen that they will curse again; when after a hundred failures man persists in faith and in love ”

“ This community is well ordered, and in it whatever is properly attempted always succeeds; besides, the yet tender age of man shall be maintained in simplicity and in quiet faith in his race. Let the knowledge of its knavery remain reserved for personal experience in mature and stronger years.
It is, therefore, only in these more mature years and in the life of earnest purpose, long after education has left him to himself, that the pupil, if his social relations should advance from simple to higher stages, could need his knowledge of religion as a motive. ”

“ The first kind of consciousness, that which is the first in point of time to develop, is that of dim feeling. Where this feeling exists, the fundamental impulse is most usually and regularly comprehended as the individual’s love of self; indeed, dim feeling shows this self at first only as something that wills to live and to prosper. Hence, material self-seeking arises as the real motive and developing power of such a life engrossed in translating its original impulse thus. So long as man continues to understand himself in this way, so long must he act selfishly, being unable to do otherwise ”

“ The divine life, therefore, that underlies all appearance reveals itself never as a fixed and known entity, but as something that is to be; and after it has become what it was to be, it will reveal itself again to all eternity as something that is to be. ”

“ Only thus, by fusion with intuition, does love too, which purely in itself is one and quite incapable of progress, of infinity, and of eternity, become like it eternal and infinite. The image mentioned just now, which is supplied from knowledge itself, considered by itself alone and without application to the love that is clearly perceived, is the fixed and given world, or nature. ”

“ Education, therefore, owes him this religion as his due absolutely, and without ulterior purpose. Religion, as a motive, has its only sphere of action in a very immoral and corrupt society, or where man’s field of activity lies not within the social order but beyond it, and rather has continually to create it anew and to maintain it; as in the case of the ruler, who often could not, without religion, perform the duties of his office with a good conscience. ”

“ Clear knowledge is the second kind of consciousness, which does not, as a rule, develop of itself, but must be carefully fostered in the community. If the fundamental impulse of man were embraced in this principle, it would produce a second class of men quite different from the first. Such knowledge, which embraces fundamental love itself, does not leave us cold and indifferent, as indeed other knowledge can, but its object is loved above everything, for that object is but the interpretation and translation of our original love itself. ”

“ A living thing affects only something living; but in the actual life of the age there is no relationship at all with this philosophy, which goes its own way in a sphere that is not yet revealed to this age, and which calls for sense-organs that it has not yet developed. This philosophy is not at home in our age, but is an anticipation of time, and a principle of life ready in advance for a generation which shall first awake to light in it. It must give up all claim on the present generation ”

“ At first every human being (and, therefore, also these two classes) is alike in this, that underlying the various manifestations of his life there is one impulse, which amid all change persists unchanged and is always the same. Incidentally, the self-comprehension of this impulse and its translation into ideas creates the world, and there is no other world but this world which is created thus in thought, not freely but of necessity. ”

“ He will thus learn to know and keep holy his own and every other spiritual life as an eternal link in the chain of the manifestation of the divine life. Only in immediate contact with God and in the direct emanation of his life from Him will he find life, light, and happiness, but in any separation from that immediate contact, death, darkness, and misery. In a word, this development will train him to religion; and this religion of the indwelling of our life in God shall indeed prevail and be carefully fostered in the new era. ”

“ This dim feeling can also, as an unusual exception to the rule, pass beyond the personal self, and comprehend the fundamental impulse as a desire for a dimly-felt different order of things. Thence arises the life, adequately described by us elsewhere, which, exalted above self-seeking, is motived by ideas, dim indeed but none the less ideas, and in which reason rules as an instinct. Such comprehension of the fundamental impulse merely by dim feeling is the characteristic of the first class of men, who are trained, not by education, but by their own selves ”

“ Other knowledge embraces something alien, which remains alien and leaves us cold; this knowledge embraces the knower himself and his love, and he loves it. Now, although it is the same original love appearing only in different forms which spurs on both classes, yet disregarding this circumstance we can say that man is governed in the one case by dim feelings, in the other by clear knowledge. ”

“ We presuppose a knowledge, not dependent on any given existence, but on the contrary itself giving laws for that existence, and propose to immerse every child of man in this knowledge from the very beginning, and to keep him from that time onwards continually under its rule. ”

“ Now, in regard to clearness in the former, two main questions must be raised; first, what it is that the pure will really wishes, and by what means this wish is to be attained; under this head is included all other knowledge which is to be taught to the pupil; secondly, what this pure will is in principle and essence; under this head is included knowledge of religion. The essentials mentioned, and their development until they influence life, education demands absolutely, and does not intend to exempt anyone from them in the slightest degree, for everyone must be a complete man. ”

“ The complete avoidance of dim feeling as a solvent of love and the setting up in its stead of clear knowledge as the usual solvent, as has already been mentioned, can happen only as the result of a deliberate art of education, and hitherto has not happened in this way. By this means too, as we have also seen, a type of man quite different from men as they have usually been hitherto will be introduced and become the rule. ”

“ Now, that such clear knowledge shall be a direct incentive in life, and shall be capable of being relied on with certainty depends, as has been said, on this, that the real true love of man is to be interpreted by it, that this is to be immediately clear to him, and that along with the interpretation the feeling of that love is to be stimulated in him and experienced by him. ”

“ For it is dim feeling alone that represents to man his ego as in need of pleasure and afraid of pain. The clear idea does not represent it thus to him, but shows it rather as a member of a moral order; and there is a love for that order which is kindled and developed along with the development of the idea. This education has nothing at all to do with self-seeking, the root of which, dim feeling, it kills through clearness. It neither attacks it nor develops it ”

“ Education to true religion is, therefore, the final task of the new education. ”

“ In order that this supersenuous and a priori world should not reveal itself in the place where this seemed unavoidable, namely, in the possibility of a knowledge of God, and that even in God Himself there should be no spiritual spontaneity, but that passive submission should remain all in all—to meet this danger the old education has hit upon the daring expedient of making the existence of God an historical fact, the truth of which is established by the examination of evidence. ”

“ It used God as a means to introduce self-seeking into other worlds after the death of the mortal body, and through fear and hope of these other worlds to reinforce for the present world the self-seeking which would otherwise have remained weak. Such a religion, which was obviously a servant of selfishness, shall indeed be borne to the grave along with the past age. In the new era eternity does not dawn first on yon side of the grave, but comes into the midst of the present life; while self-seeking is dismissed from serving and from ruling, and departs, taking its servants with it. ”

“ It is apparent and, I believe, generally granted that the impulse and effort of the age has been seeking to dispel dim feelings and to secure the sole mastery for clearness and knowledge. This effort has been quite successful at least in this, that it has completely revealed the nothingness of the past. The impulse towards clearness should not be rooted out, nor should dull acquiescence in dim feeling again obtain the mastery. ”

“ On the other hand, the religion of the past separated the spiritual life from the divine, and only by apostasy against the divine life could it procure for the spiritual life the absolute existence which it had ascribed to it. ”

“ Just as it led him to sketch out for himself by his own activity an image of that moral world-order which never is, but always is to be, so must it lead him to create in thought by the same self-activity an image of that supersensuous world-order in which nothing becomes, and which never has become, but which simply is for ever ”