Joseph Alexander Leighton

“ If personality and consciousness are to be denied of God, it is only in the sense in which we conceive ourselves as personal and conscious. [15] God is a wider consciousness than we are, a pure intelligence, spiritual life and actuality. He is neither one nor many, neither man nor spirit. Such predicates belong only to finite beings. Again, God’s existence cannot be proved. Not from the sense-world, for Fichte’s system is acosmistic. Not from the super sensuous world, for proof implies mediation. The supersensuous World-Order is God, and is immediately perceived through the inner sense. ”

“ It is a necessity of God’s nature that he throw out from himself a part of his determinate being or manifestation, and establish this part in true independence and freedom. We are such parts of God’s determinate being and as such are conscious free beings independent of God. Each individual has the power of free choice, which God himself cannot take away. But this choice is rightly exercised in recognizing our being in God and submitting to his will. Being is originally separated in its determinate existence into individual existences, and will remain so separated to all eternity. ”

“ In the Vocation of Man, published in 1800, God is characterized as the living holy will in whom we live and move and have our being. He reveals himself in the heart, and is comprehended by faith. He is best known to the simple child-like mind. Faith in duty is faith in God. My will is a part of two orders, the spiritual and the sensuous. The law or order of the supersensuous world is the Infinite Will. ”

“ To argue from the existence of this sense-world to an Intelligence who is the author of it, is to cheat us with empty words. All the determinations of this intelligence are conceptions, and how can these either create matter ex nihilo or modify an eternal matter? ”

“ In all human actions, two things are reckoned, a determination of the individual’s will and something independent of his will, by which a consequence follows his willing. So in morality, if A stand for the determination of the will to an end, and B for that principle through which there comes about a consequence necessarily connected with A, then the law of the connection of A and B in the moral order of things is the moral World-Order, and is outside of, and independent of, finite moral beings. ”

“ But it does not lie within my power to realize any moral end in the world. I can only determine myself to make the choice. The end is achieved only as a consequence of a higher law, a moral World-Order. The living and working moral order is God himself, and we can conceive no other. [7] This moral World-Order can be deduced from nothing else. It is the basis of all objective knowledge, the ground of all certainty. ”

“ In this work Fichte seems still to regard God as a being-in-himself, apart from the world, who may reveal himself by interposing from without at particular times in the world’s history. But this revelation must be wholly in accordance with man’s moral nature. It is only possible, as a fact in the sense-world, when a man or Humanity has sunk so low that the moral laws given by pure reason have entirely lost their influence. ”

“ He regards God, taken in such a sense, as being quite as immediately certain as our own existence. Duty cannot be done absolutely without reference to an end, for in that case it would be without content. Man must act with regard to an end, and this end is blessedness, not enjoyment. God as moral World-Order makes it possible that this end be realized. On the other hand, the end which his opponents set before themselves is enjoyment. Their God who dispenses enjoyment is a material existence, a prince of this world. ”

“ What ‘spirit’ or ‘consciousness’ meant when applied to God, Fichte wisely abstained from attempting to define. From all his writings there stands out clearly the firm, unfaltering conviction that outside the world of spirit there is nothing real. ”

“ What from the theoretical point of view is pure or Absolute Ego, from the practical point of view is God. [4] The Wissenschaftslehre is not a doctrine of subjective idealism which deduces the world from the individual or finite Ego. The ground of both, by whose self-determination both arise, is the absolute Ego. Just as Spinoza regarded the unity of extension and thought as a substance underlying both, so Fichte regards the unity of the finite Egos and the non-Ego as a unity underlying and supporting the finite conscious Egos, an absolute Ego. The doctrine is objective idealism. ”

“ This principle or World-Order is Activity, not dead Permanency. It is a living being, “creating, maintaining, governing.” Inasmuch as these predicates are asserted of one principle, we must think a permanent substrate to which these belong and which unites the different predicates. The oneness is mediate; the predicates arise immediately. The one principle can only be thought of “as a, for itself, existing and working principle,” [17] as pure Spirit, as Creator, Maintainer, and Governor. But this thinking is an abstraction. Abstractly the principle of the world is a logical subject. ”

“ Determinate Being is pure Being becoming conscious of itself in a particular or determinate form. It is an image of pure Being. It is our nature as finite conscious beings to split the one pure Being in our consciousness into multiplicity, and hence arises the world. Inasmuch as in consciousness we are determinate beings, we can never know how determinate Being comes from pure Being. We are by no means the Absolute Being, but only fragments of this Absolute Being. ”

“ Fichte says again and again in this work that the nature of Being is to manifest itself, that it is ever active, ever living and loving, and not a dead permanency. As he puts it in Lecture I, “Being and Life are one and the same.” When he says Being is unchangeable, he means that it ever persists through all change. Change is itself a manifestation of the living Being. “The Divine is thinking and living in one organic unity.” ”

“ Concrete thinking gives us God as Activity, as the Creating, Maintaining, Governing, etc. “The conception of God cannot be determined by categories of existence, but only by predicates of an activity.” ”

“ To characterize God as a spirit, is of negative value in distinguishing Him from things material. [13] It gives us no positive information, for we know as little wherein the being of a spirit consists as wherein the being of God consists. Inasmuch as all our thinking is limiting, God is inconceivable. ”

“ In the Wissenschaftslehre he is concerned only with the deduction of theoretical and practical knowledge from the nature of the Ego. It is the material world that is denied. As Fichte himself expressed it later, his philosophy is acosmistic. Subjective idealism it certainly is not. The absolute or pure Ego is assumed as starting-point, and the deduction of our world of knowledge therefrom is proceeded with. ”

“ The object of the Wissenschaftslehre seems to be to deduce the individual Ego from the absolute Ego. The absolute Ego is established as unconditioned ground of the individual Ego and Non-Ego. This absolute Ego is defined as an “Ego in whose self-determination all the Non-Ego is determined.” ”

“ Under conditions such as these a fact in the world of sense, the causality of which is attributed to a supersensible Being, may give sanction to the moral Law and force men to obedience of it. In other words, God may reveal himself immediately through the world of sense and demand obedience. ”

“ He remarks that God’s self-consciousness could only be explained by the presupposition that God thinks His own being. But, since in God the reflected and the reflecting would be all one, His self-consciousness is still not explained. Never at any time did Fichte deny consciousness or personality to God except when protesting against the crude anthropomorphic way of attributing to God a consciousness like our own. ”