William Smith

“ Fichte died as he bad lived,—the priest of knowledge, the apostle of freedom, the martyr of humanity. He belongs to those Great Men whose lives are an everlasting possession to mankind, and whose words the world does not willingly let die. His character stands written in his life, a massive but severely simple whole. It has no parts;—the depth and earnestness on which it rests, speak forth alike in his thoughts, words, and actions. No man of his time—few perhaps of any time—exercised a more powerful, spirit-stirring influence over the minds of his fellow-countrymen. ”

“ We find besides, Will, Freedom, Self-determination; and here is a world altogether independent of sense, and of the knowledge of outward things. Freedom is the root, the very ground-work of our being; free determination is the most intimate and certain fact in our nature. To this freedom we find an absolute law addressed,—the unconditional law of morality. Here, then, in the practical world of duty, of free obedience, of moral determination, we have the true world of man, in which the moral agent is the only existence, the moral act the only reality. ”

“ He is thus the creator and sustainer of all things; for in Him alone all the thronging forms which people our dream of life “live and move and have their being.” All partake His essence:—material nature disappears, but its images are invested with a new reality. All our life is His life; and we are eternal, for He is eternal. Birth and the grave are no more; but, in their stead, undying energy and immortal youth. Of Him—the Infinite One,—of the mode of His being, we know nothing, nor need we to know ”

“ If the spectacle of the scholar contending against the hindrances of fortune and the imperfections of his own nature,—struggling with the common passions of mankind and the weakness of his own will,—soaring aloft amid the highest speculations of genius, and dragged down again to earth by its meanest wants;—if this be one of the most painful spectacles which the theatre of life presents, surely it is one of the noblest when we see such a man pursuing some lofty theme with a constancy which neither difficulty nor discouragement can subdue. Such was now Fichte’s position. ”

“ The voice of conscience, of highest reason, bids us know, love, and honour beings like ourselves;—and those beings crowd around us. The ends of their and our existence demand the powers and appliances of physical life for their attainment;—that life, and the means of sustaining and using it, stand before us. The world is nothing more than the sphere and object of human activity; it exists because the purposes of our moral life require its existence. Of the law of duty we are immediately certain;—the world becomes a reality to us by means of that previous certainty. ”

“ A gift out of mere compassion for my poverty I would abhor, and even hate the giver:—this is perhaps the most neglected part of my character. But the gift of friendship, of a friendship which, like yours, rests upon cordial esteem, cannot proceed from compassion, and is an honour, not a dishonour. But, in truth, I need it not. I have indeed no money by me at present, but I have no unusual disbursements to make, and I shall have enough to meet my very small regular expenses till my departure. I seldom come into difficulties when I have no money,—I believe Providence watches over me. ”

“ But the spirit of Fichte’s philosophy is a proud and bold spirit, for which the domain of human knowledge, even in its widest extent, is too narrow; which opens up new paths at every step it takes; which struggles with language in order to wrest from it words enough for its wealth of thought; which does not lead us, but seizes and hurries us along, and whose finger cannot touch an object without bruising it to dust. ”

“ Even his hatred is the offspring of a higher love. Truly indeed has he been described by one of our own country’s brightest ornaments as a “colossal, adamantine spirit, standing erect and clear, like a Cato Major among degenerate men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of beauty and virtue in the groves of Academe.” But the sublimity of his intellect casts no shade on the soft current of his affections, which flows, pure and unbroken, through the whole course of his life, to enrich, fertilize, and adorn it. ”

“ In no other man of modern times do we find the stern grandeur of ancient virtue so blended with the kindlier humanities of our nature which flourish best under a gentler civilization. We prize his philosophy deeply,—it is to us an invaluable possession, for it seems the noblest exposition to which we have yet listened of human nature and divine truth,—but with reverent thankfulness we acknowledge a still higher debt, for he has left behind him the best gift which man can bequeath to man,—a brave, heroic human life. ”

“ Every complete and consistent philosophy contains a deterministic side, for the thought of an all-directing Unity is the beginning and end of profound investigation. Fatalism sees in this highest Unity a dark and mysterious Nemesis,—an unconscious mechanical necessity: determinism sees in it the highest disposing Reason, the infinite Spirit and God, to whom the determination of each living being is not only to be referred, but in whom alone it becomes clear and intelligible. ”

“ How Thou art, and seemest to Thine own being, I can never know, any more than I can assume Thy nature. After thousands upon thousands of spirit-lives, I shall comprehend Thee as little as I do now in this earthly house. That which I conceive, becomes finite through my very conception of it; and this can never, even by endless exaltation, rise into the Infinite. Thou differest from men, not in degree but in nature. In every stage of their advancement they think of Thee as a greater man, and still a greater; but never as God—the Infinite,—whom no measure can mete. ”

“ And now one nation speaks forth the word which all are struggling to utter, and soon every eye is turned upon France,—the theatre on which the new act in the drama of human history is to be acted; where freedom and right are once more to become realities; where man, no longer a mere appendage to the soil, is to start forth on a new career of activity and honour, and show the world the spectacle of an ennobled and regenerated race. ”

“ The surest means of acquiring a conviction of a life after death is so to act in this life that we can venture to wish for another. He who feels that if there be a God he must look down graciously upon him, will not be disturbed by arguments against his being, and he needs none for it. He who has sacrificed so much for virtue that he looks for recompense in a future life, needs no proof of the reality of such a life;—he does not believe in it,—he feels it. ”

“ Whether those who have believed that Humanity must ever advance in a course of ceaseless improvement, and that the great ideas of its order and dignity were not empty dreams, but the prophetic announcement and pledge of their own future realization;—whether those have been right—or they who have slumbered on in the sluggish indolence of a mere vegetable or animal existence, and mocked every aspiration towards a higher world,—this is the question to which it has fallen to your lot to furnish a last and decisive answer. ”

“ Fichte’s philosophy is, so to speak, more philosophical than Reinhold’s. You hear him going digging and seeking after truth. In rough masses he brings it forth from the deep, and throws it from him. He does not say what he will do; he does it. Reinhold’s doctrine was rather an announcement of a philosophy, than a philosophy itself. He has never fulfilled his promises. Not unfrequently did lie give forth the promise for the fulfilment. He never will fulfil them,—for he is now past away. ”

“ Fichte seems really determined to work upon the world through his philosophy. The tendency to restless activity which dwells in the breast of every noble youth he would carefully nourish and cultivate, that it may in due season bring forth fruit. He seizes every opportunity of teaching that action—action—is the vocation of man; whereby it is only to be feared that the majority of young men who lay the maxim to heart may look upon this summons to action as only a summons to demolition. And, strictly speaking, the principle is false. Man is not called upon to act, but to act justly ”

“ That profound and searching intellect, which, in the province of Metaphysics, cast aside as fallacious and deceptive those solid-seeming principles on which ordinary men are content to take their stand, and clearing its way to the most hidden depths of thought, sought there a firm foundation on which to build a structure of human knowledge, whose summit should tower as high above common faith as its base was sunk deep below common observation,—does here, when applied to a question of practical judgment, exhibit the same clearness of vision, strength of thought, and subtilty of discrimination. ”

“ All Death in nature is Birth,—the assumption of a new garment, to replace the old vesture which humanity has laid aside in its progress to higher being. And serene above all change, the unattainable object of all finite effort—fountain of our life—home of our spirits—Thou art the One Being,—the I AM,—for whom Reason has no idea, and Language no name. ”

“ The impulse which he communicated to the national thought extended far beyond the sphere of his personal influence;—it has awakened,—it will still awaken,—high emotion and manly resolution in thousands who never heard his voice. The ceaseless effort of his life was to rouse men to a sense of the divinity of their own nature;—to fix their thoughts upon a spiritual life as the only true and real life;—to teach them to look upon all else as mere show and unreality; and thus to lead them to constant effort after the highest Ideal of purity, virtue, independence, and self-denial. ”

“ All Ages,—all the Wise and Good who have ever breathed the air of this world of ours,—all their thoughts and aspirations towards a Higher Good,—mingle with these voices, and encompass you about, and raise supplicating hands towards you;—Providence itself, if we may venture so to speak, and the Divine Plan in the creation of a Human race,—which indeed exists only that it may be understood of men, and by men be wrought out into reality,—plead with you to save their honour and their existence. ”

“ A circumstance which seemed the result of mere chance, led me to give myself up entirely to the study of the Kantian philosophy,—a philosophy that restrains the imagination which was always too powerful with me, gives reason the sway, and raises the soul to an indescribable elevation above all earthly concerns. I have accepted a nobler morality, and instead of occupying myself with outward things, I employ myself more with my own being. ”

“ Thus a chain of causes and effects, in which Freedom is superfluous and without aim, cannot be the limit of our existence: the law of our being cannot be fulfilled in the world of sense;—there must then be a super-sensual world, in which it may be accomplished. In this purely spiritual world, will alone is the first link of a chain of consequences which pervades the whole invisible realm of being; as action, in the sensual world, is the first link of a material chain which runs through the whole system of nature. Will is the active living principle of the super-sensual world ”

“ In these relations the active and moral powers of man find their sphere. The moral law imparts to its objects—to all things whose existence is implied in its fulfillment—the same certainty which belongs to itself. The outward world assumes a new reality, for we have imperative duties to perform which demand its existence. Life ceases to be an empty show without truth or significance;—it is our field of duty, the theatre on which our moral destiny is to be wrought out. ”