Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/108

 extent put in the right, gains new friends by the injustice which it suffers, and by this conviction of the justice of its cause acquires a stronger power of opposition; and the matter ends by the State being obliged to yield, whereby it once more shows only its own weakness. In like manner, neither will the few worshippers of True Knowledge hinder these advocates of unrestricted license. They have no power to do so; and if they had, they would not desire to use it. Their weapons are no other than the forces of Reason; their wishes for the world no other than that these forces should make their way by means of free conviction. Whatever they say is to be clearly understood as true and as alone true: nothing they say is to be learned by rote and accepted in faith and trust; for then would Humanity be only brought back again to bondage, and subjected to a new authority; and instead of the desired progress there would be only a retreat in a new direction. Could these men comprehend it, they would no doubt acknowledge its truth;—for we do not charge them with the baseness which disavows its own conviction of better things. But precisely because they do not comprehend it they are what they are; and so must they remain so long as they do not comprehend it:—since they are once for all what they are, it is impossible for them to become anything else;—and they must be endured, as integral parts of an unchangeable and necessary order of things.

This mode of thought, I said before, will strive to spread itself universally; and in certain masses of the Human Race it will succeed in this, and with them the whole Age will become a camp of mere Formal Knowledge. Who rules in this camp, and leads on its armies?—‘Clearly,’ it will be answered, ‘the Heroes of the Age; the champions in whom the Spirit of the Time has most gloriously revealed itself.’ But who are these, and by what marks are they to be recognised? Perchance by the importance of the researches