Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/140

 desire of bringing forward something wholly new, which desire itself we have already discovered among the characteristics of this Epoch,—precisely inverting the principle of the Age, and representing its pretension to understand all things as its bane and the source of all its error,—should now, on the contrary, set up the Incomprehensible as such, and on account of its incomprehensibility, as their own principle,—as all of which man stands in need, the true source of all healing and sanctification. Even this phenomenon, as I said before, although apparently quite opposed to the Third Age, does nevertheless belong to the necessary phenomena of this Age, and is not to be overlooked in a complete delineation of it.

In the first place, the fact that the supporters of the maxim,—that we must be able to understand everything which we ought to admit as true,—do nevertheless constantly accept many things which neither they nor their opponents understand, is a manifest contradiction of the maxim itself; which contradiction obviously cannot take place, or be theoretically propounded until the maxim itself be announced, and indeed only arises in the polemical discussion of the maxim;—a contradiction, however, which must necessarily make its appearance so soon as this maxim has been prevalent for any length of time, has received mature consideration, and has been brought out in clear and unequivocal distinctness. Thus the announcement of this principle of the Incomprehensible is neither the beginning nor yet any essential element of the new Age which is to arise out of the Third, namely, the Age of Reason as Knowledge; for it finds no fault with the maxim of absolute Intelligibility, but rather recognises it as its own; finding fault only with the mischievous and worthless notion which is now made the standard of this Intelligibility, and the measure of all authentic Truth; while as to Intelligibility itself, the Age of Reason as Knowledge lays it down as a fundamental principle, that everything, even