Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/461

 SECOND PERIOD. 439 positive laws (intermediate between the law of right and legal judgments) what shall be considered rights. Thus there result three subjects for natural right : original rights or the sum of that which pertains to freedom or personality (inviolability of the body and of property), the right of coercion, and political right. The aim of punishment is the reform of the evil doer and the deterrence of others. Fichte is in agreement with Kant concerning the principle — of popular sovereignty (Rousseau) and the exercise of the political power through representatives ; but not so con- cerning the guaranties against the violation of the funda- mental law of the state. Instead of the division of powers recommended by Kant he demands supervision of the rulers of the state by ephors, who, themselves without any legislative or executive authority, shall suspend the rulers in case they violate the law, and call them to account before the community. Every constitution in which the rulers are not responsible is despotic. Fichte did not continue loyal to this principle, that the state is merely a legal institution. He not only demands a state organization of labor by which everyone shall be placed in a position to live from his work, in the Natural Right and the Exclusive Commercial State, but, in his posthu- mous Theory of Right, 1812, he makes it the chief duty of the state to lead men, by the moral and intellectual train- ing of the people, to do from insight what they have hith- erto done from traditional belief. Through the education of the people the empirical state is gradually to transform itself into the rational state. 3. Fichte's Second Period : his View of History and his Theory of Religion. Fichte's transfer to Berlin brought him into more intimate contact with the world, and along with new experiences and new emotions gave him new problems. While a vig-. orously developing religious sentiment turned his specula- tion to the relation of the individual ego to the primal source of spiritual life, empirical reality also acquired greater. significance for him, and the intellectual, moral, and polit- '