Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/128

112 system, indeed, as the last word of speculative metaphysics. Lessing and Goethe had been attracted to it, and the young Fichte heroically accepted its rigid determinism as inevitable. It was Kant's solution of the controversy between the head and the heart that provided an escape from the causal bugbear and made the 'new' philosophy spread like wild-fire, winning for its modest author the proud title which he had claimed for himself as "the reformer of philosophy." To Fichte it came as a revelation and a revolution that caused the Spinozistic scales to drop from his eyes and converted him into an eloquent and life-long apostle of freedom.

Fichte and Schelling grappled with the same problem as Kant; they, too, endeavored "to deliver man from the terrors of the objective world," as Schelling once expressed it; only they were not satisfied with merely thinking the thing in itself, they yearned to see it face to face, in intellectual or artistic intuition, through a function which Kant had denied to human reason, but which his two successors held to be possible by an act of will. They both shared, also, Kant's view of the powerlessness of the intellect to pierce through the surfaces of things into the living, pulsating heart of reality. No romanticist of our own day can be more emphatic than they in accusing the discursive understanding of deadening and mechanizing life and everything that comes within the sphere of its paralyzing influence. "Conceptual thinking," Fichte warns us again and again, "transforms the immediate life-process into stationary and dead existence," and Schelling harps on the same string in countless brilliant variations. The ordinary intelligence with its scientific method, forever searching after causes, forever relating, can accomplish nothing outside of the field of dead being to which it should confine its attention. Only by a kind of philosophical conversion, by a sudden leap of the mind, as it were, can man raise himself out of the machinery of nature and become conscious of the inner, active, self-determining reality in himself. You can prove that you are not a thing, a mere product of nature, only by refusing to be a thing; the only way of escape from materialism and determinism is by an act of freedom in which