Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/163

 vocation of Humanity that in this, its first life on Earth, it should train itself up with freedom to become an outward manifestation of Reason. But out of nothing, nothing can arise; and thus Unreason can never become Reason. Hence, in one point of its existence, at least, the Human Race must have been purely Reasonable in its primitive form, without either constraint or freedom. In one point of its existence, at least, I say; for the true purpose of its existence does not consist in being Reasonable, but in becoming Reasonable by its own freedom; and the former is only the means and the indispensable condition of the latter: we are therefore entitled to no more extensive conclusion than that the condition of Absolute Reasonableness must have been somewhere extant. From this conclusion we are forced to admit the existence of an original Normal People, who by the mere fact of their existence, without Science or Art, found themselves in a state of perfectly developed Reason. But there is nothing to hinder us from also admitting that there lived at the same time dispersed over the whole earth, timid and rude Earth born Savages without any Culture but what was necessary for the preservation of their mere sensuous existence;—for the purpose of the life of the Human Race is only to cultivate itself according to Reason, and it would be quite practicable to carry out this process among the Earth born Savages by means of the Normal People.

As an immediate consequence of this position, no History should attempt to explain the origin of Culture in general, nor the Population of the different regions of the Earth. The laboured hypotheses, especially on the last point, which are accumulated in books of travels, are, in our opinion, trouble and labour lost. But there is nothing from which History, as well as a certain half-philosophy, should more carefully guard itself than the altogether irrational and fruitless attempt to raise Unreason to Reason by a gradual lessening of its degree; and, given