Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/132

 Unlearned, unaccompanied however by the strict proof of which it is susceptible in the system of pure Thought,—to adduce which would render the communication itself Learned and Scholastic;—which knowledge is then authenticated immediately by the Unlearned themselves through their own natural sense of Truth; just as we have proceeded in these lectures which we have announced as popular discourses. I myself have found what has been here taught in a consecutive system of Thought, but I have not communicated it to you in this shape. In one of our first lectures I requested you to inquire whether you could withhold your approval from such a way of thinking as I there described, and if you should find it impossible to do so, I asked you whether, within your own selves, Reason does not in this way declare in favour of such a mode of Thought:—in the two last lectures I have presented the opposite view to you in such a light that its falsehood and perversion must have been immediately evident; and if I made myself intelligible to you it must have excited, at least, inward amusement. Other proofs I have not here adduced. I teach the same things in my scientific philosophical lectures; but there I accompany my teachings with proofs of another description. Further,—these lectures have been addressed,—as popular-philosophical discourses,—to a cultivated audience, and therefore I have clothed them in cultivated language, and in that garb of metaphor which belongs to it. I might have taught the same things to the people, from the pulpit, in the character of a preacher, and then it would have been necessary to make use of Bible language:—for example, what I have here termed the Life in the Idea, should in that case have been named Resignation to the Will of God; or Devotion to the Will of God, &c. This popular communication of knowledge by the Learned to the Unlearned, can only be effected in discourses,—or by means of the press if