Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/166

 the inequality among men discoverable wherever History has a beginning;—and so forth.

All that we have now set forth are necessary conditions of the existence of a Human Race;—the latter, however, must absolutely be, and hence the former must have been;—so far Philosophy informs us. Now all this is not merely a general supposition, but these things must further have had a definite existence;—for example, with regard to what we have said above,—the existence of the Normal People is not a mere general supposition, but they must have existed in one particular region of the earth and in no other; although, so far as appears to us, they might have existed elsewhere; they had a language, which of course was constituted according to the fundamental laws of all language, but which possessed besides an element which appears to us as if it might have been otherwise, and therefore as an arbitrary element. Here Philosophy is at an end, because the Comprehensible is at an end; and what is Incomprehensible in the present life begins. Here accordingly Empiricism enters the field, which in this connexion is named History;—and the subordinate phenomena, which only in their general nature can be deduced from a priori principles, would now present themselves in their special and particular character as facts, without any explanation of their genesis, if they were not necessarily concealed from the view of History by other causes.

This much, however, follows from what has now been said:—History is mere Empiricism; it has only facts to communicate, and all its proofs are founded upon facts alone. To attempt to rise from such facts to Primeval History, or to argue how such or such a thing might have been, and then to take for granted that it has been so in reality,—is to stray beyond the limits of History, and produce an a priori History; just as the Philosophy of Nature, referred to in our preceding lecture, endeavoured to find an a priori Science of Physics.