Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/149

 whether you could refrain from approving, respecting, and admiring a Life wholly devoted to the Idea?—this question refers exclusively to an action, and to your judgment upon that action; and therefore, while we were elevated above the world of mere sensuous Experience, it is evident that there was nevertheless nothing of Mysticism in our inquiries. To adduce a still more marked example:—The Doctrine of a Perfect God; in whose nature nothing arbitrary or changeable can have a place; in whose Highest Being we all live, and in this Life may and ought at all times to be blessed;—this Doctrine, which ignorant men think they have sufficiently demolished when they have proclaimed it to be Mysticism, is by no means Mysticism, for it has an immediate reference to human action, and indeed to the inmost spirit which ought to inspire and guide all our actions. It can only become Mysticism when it is associated with the pretext that the insight into this truth proceeds from a certain inward and mysterious light, which is not accessible to all men, but is bestowed only upon a few favourites chosen from among the rest:—in which pretext the real Mysticism consists, for it betrays a self-complacent assumption of personal merit, and a pride in mere sensuous Individuality. Thus Mysticism, besides the essential and inward criterion which can only be thoroughly discovered by true Speculation, has also an outward mark by which it may be recognised;—this, namely, that it is never a Moral or Religious Philosophy, to both of which it is, in its true character, wholly antagonistic; (what it calls Religion is only a deification of Nature)—but it is always a mere Philosophy of Nature;—that is, it strives to discover, or believes that it has discovered, certain mysterious and hitherto inconceivable properties in the principles of Nature, by the employment of which it endeavours to produce effects surpassing the ordinary course of things. Such, I say, is Mysticism,—