Robert Adamson

“ Acceptance of these ideas—the ideas upon which rest art, science, the polity of nations and religion—and self-renunciation for them, are the only sources of truly noble action. “Everything great and good upon which our present existence rests, from which it has proceeded, exists only because noble and powerful men have resigned all the enjoyments of life for the sake of ideas.” ”

“ Immortality is not beyond this life, but in it. “There is no more striking proof that the knowledge of true religion has hitherto been very rare among men, and that, in particular, it is a stranger in the prevailing systems, than this, that they universally place eternal blessedness beyond the grave, and never for a moment imagine that whoever will may here and at once be blessed.” ”

“ It was now evident that the final synthesis—the concrete reality of reason—required a treatment much more elaborate than it had yet received,—that in the conception of the finite Ego as accepting the infinite vocation of the moral law, more was implied than the pure self-activity, pure freedom, through which consciousness of this vocation was possible; and that the relation between knowledge as form, will as ground of reality, and the supreme notion of the divine order, was as yet imperfect. ”

“ We must have faith in this impulse to independence, which is the very innermost secret of our nature. Thought is not supreme, but is founded on our striving energies. Unhesitating acceptance of our vocation and of the conditions implied in it—through this only has life reality for us. ”

“ The law upon which the individual rests, is only a law of order, not a creative rule. The third view takes up into itself what is of value in the second, but gives to it a higher and deeper significance. In the higher morality, as Fichte calls it, [23] the individual is filled with the desire to realise actively the divine will. The moral law, and that which springs from it—rights and state mechanism—are regarded only as means whereby the ideas, which represent in our consciousness the prescripts of the divine will, are to receive manifestation in fact. ”

“ The final and crowning stage of the development of the individual consciousness is therefore that in which the finite spirit by thought or reason apprehends the organic plan of existence, knows with clearness the intimate nature of the relations which unite him and all other finite spirits in one community of free intelligences with a common aim and purpose, and thus subjectively realises the supreme synthesis of thought. ”

“ The heroic life is the life of the higher morality, of devotion to ideas.
Even this heroic life manifests in one of its aspects an imperfection. “So long as joy in the deed is mingled with desires concerning the outward product of the deed, even the possessor of the higher morality is not yet perfect in purity and clearness; and thus in the divine economy, the outward failure of his deed is the means of forcing him in upon himself, and of raising him to the yet higher standpoint of true religion—that is, to the comprehension of what it really is that he loves and strives after.” ”

“ The existence or definite realisation of being, that, in and for which only opposition between being and existence is present and necessarily present, is consciousness,—conscious life, the life of knowledge, thought and action. ”

“ No one individual exhausts the possibilities of this divine life; and as opposed to its infinite being, the existence of any individual must be thought as contingent or accidental. Nevertheless, only in and through the form of individuality—i.e., of self-consciousness—can the divine life receive expression. Thus nature, as object of intelligence, and self-consciousness as the essence of intelligence, appear in their true place. They are modes of the manifestation or realisation of the moral law or ethical end. ”

“ In the form of cognition we can never attain to more than formal truth.
With this sceptical conclusion the second book closes. In the third, the transition is effected to the higher, the practical stage of Fichte’s philosophy, by a method partly identical with that already described, but in part containing a new and startling feature. Not knowledge only, but action, is the end of existence. The restless striving after a reality which is not given in thought, has significance only in reference to the active, energetic power by which self endeavours to mould the world to its own purposes. ”

“ Thus the one reality, the one life, the life of consciousness, which is the manifestation of God, breaks itself up into an endless multiplicity of individual forms,—forms which in the experience of the finite spirit must present themselves as independent, self-existing facts, but which for thought are only modes of the one, infinite life. The finite spirit may apprehend this world of phenomena and its relation to the real system by reflective consideration of it ”

“ Yet as surely as reason is reason, must the will operate absolutely by itself, and independently of the natural laws by which the material action is determined; and hence the life of every finite being points towards a higher, into which the will by itself alone may open the way, and of which it may acquire possession—a possession which indeed we must sensuously conceive of as a state, and not as a mere will.” Thus the true essence of the finite being is his participation in the divine, spiritual order ”

“ Soul and body are the forms under which imagination, or perception, if we prefer a less ambiguous term, contemplates the limited, definite activity of the Ego. At the same time, his view is not to be identified either with materialism, which likewise endeavours to regard all finite existence as the form of some underlying substance—or with subjective idealism, which regards external reality, and the existence of other Egos, as modes of the individual consciousness. The one system is incapable of explaining consciousness in general ”

“ It is in this second portion that Fichte begins to connect in one organic whole the elements of his system which, in the earlier Wissenschaftslehre, had been suffered to remain detached from one another.
The function of thought, as opposed to mere opinion, is to conceive of being, of the ultimate reality which underlies all objects of knowledge. True being is one, unchangeable and perdurable. But in its unity and unchangeability it does not exist; it has no reality; it is mere abstraction. To say merely that God is, is to say nothing. ”

“ In the consciousness of the moral end which is to be realised, the individual is one with the community of individual Egos. The infinite life, if it is to be realised at all, must have expression in individual forms; and each finite spirit is an individual, and is aware of himself as an individual, only in so far as he has individual duties,—a special sphere of moral action. ”

“ So far as the individual is concerned, there now comes forward, in place of mere formal independence—abstract freedom of thought and self-dependence in action—the free resignation of the individual to the law of the divine order, with love for it and active effort to give its precepts realisation. The position of morality, as expressed in the ‘Naturrecht’ and ‘Sittenlehre,’ has been transcended and absorbed in that of religion. ”

“ But if we endeavour to subject this feeling of free self-activity, of independent purpose, to the analysis of reason, the sceptical doubts regarding knowledge return with their former force. It is conceivable that the distinction of the self willing and the conditions under which the volition is to be realised—the twofold aspect of all will, as thought and as act—may be nothing but the form imposed by cognitive consciousness on the operation of some unknown external power. ”

“ At the same time, the Ego exists for itself only in and by reflection, and reflection is in its very essence limitative and separating. The Ego, therefore, can be conceived only as one of many Egos, which are united in thought, but manifold for intuition. A system of individuals, corporeally distinct from one another, is thus the condition under which self-consciousness is realised. ”

“ For if he is truly penetrated with the love of the divine law and life, he will recognise as the one thing above all value the development of the divine life in him. He is one manifestation of the divine life: all that he does or thinks is the act and thought of the divine life. That the result of his thought and action should not correspond with his conception or desire will not affect him. ”

“ Things and finite spirits are not to be thought as developments of some inconceivable, mechanical necessity, but as the form in which the moral order—the highest expression of the reason we find in us—has existence or reality. ”

“ The essence of the external thing is force, and it is the thought of force as lying behind the specific modes of feeling which we call sensations, that gives to the object of perception its qualification as an external, real fact.
The Ego, then, is only conscious of itself as activity in a corporeal world, but to be conscious of itself as active in relation to the corporeal world, it must be for itself corporeal. The body or corporeal organism is the Ego as an objective thing. The Ego is a possible object of intuition only in so far as it is corporeal. ”

“ The finite reason—which does not of itself constitute the world of reason, but is only one of its many members—lives necessarily at the same time in a sensuous order—that is to say, in one which presents to it another object beyond a purely spiritual activity—a material object to be promoted by instruments and powers which indeed stand under the immediate dominion of the will, but whose activity is also conditioned by their own natural laws. ”

“ The first is that in which the world, as matter of outer sense, is regarded as the only existence and the only reality. Such a view is manifestly imperfect and partial—the things of sense are only there for thought; and a system which, abstracting from thought, proposes to treat them as self-existent facts, of necessity throws out of account the most important factor in the process of knowledge. ”

“ Realisation of itself in this world cannot, however, be looked upon as the one aim of the rational will. For in such realisation in deed or fact, that which is to inner consciousness the pre-eminent excellence of moral action—the intention or disposition—becomes of no account. ”

“ The individual is thus a mode or form of the process by which freedom is realised, and the infinite series of individuals makes up the complete system of modes or forms in and through which the moral life, the divine plan, is to be carried out. ”

“ The object of his will is only “that in the conduct of each individual there may be manifested purely that form which the essential divine nature has assumed within this particular individual—that, on the other hand, each individual may recognise God, as He is outwardly manifested to him in the conduct of all other men; that all others may, in like manner, recognise God as He is outwardly manifested to them in the conduct of this particular individual—and that thus God alone may be ever manifested in all outward appearance.” ”

“ This being, which reveals itself in the infinite life, which manifests itself in the form of individual consciousness or knowledge, which exists not apart from its manifestation, but yet is as opposed to this manifestation, is the supreme unity of thought—a unity not to be perfectly comprehended, not to be grasped in thought, but seen to be the ultimate inconceivability. To this supreme unity Fichte gives the significant title—God; and in it he finds the ultimate notion of all consciousness. “Knowledge as a whole, is not mere knowledge of itself ”

“ The analysis of consciousness has thus led Fichte to a conclusion resembling in all essentials that already stated in the ‘Bestimmung des Menschen.’ The concluding portion of the work [16] introduces a new notion or at least a change of terminology, which has given rise to much misunderstanding, and has caused excellent critics, such as Erdmann, to pronounce the later philosophy out of harmony with the earlier Wissenschaftslehre. The infinite life—that which underlies all consciousness—has been seen to be the infinite means of realisation of the supreme moral law. ”

“ There is something that must be done for its own sake—that which conscience demands of me in this particular situation of life it is mine to do, and for this purpose only am I here;—to know it I have understanding ”

“ For thought, whether popular or general, is in essence abstraction—that is, tendency to separate what is inseparable, to give permanence and apparent independence to that which is transient and dependent. Thus the relation of the infinite moral order to the finite modes in which it takes expression for itself, is hardly to be thought without danger of falling back into the old theological error of severing entirely from one another God and the world of nature and finite spirits. That Fichte altogether escapes this danger cannot be said ”

“ We are compelled to believe that we act, and that we ought to act, in a certain manner; we are compelled to assume a certain sphere for this action; this sphere is the real, actually present world, such as we find it. ”

“ The Ego, as understood in common fashion, posits neither the external object nor itself, but both are posited through general, absolute thinking, and through this the object is given for the Ego, as well as the Ego for itself. ”

“ Wissenschaftslehre as theoretical ends; and the interpretation of his position, as here given, is but an expansion of the principle, already noted as fundamental in Fichte, that knowledge is pure form. The process of subjective analysis—i.e., of analysis for cognition,—when carried out rigorously, leaves as result a system of Vorstellungen. “There is nothing enduring, either out of me or in me, but only a ceaseless change. I know of no being, not even of my own. There is no being. ”