Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/18

 subsequent development; and I must entreat you to look for perfect light only at our conclusion, when a complete survey of the whole shall have become possible. Nevertheless it is the duty of every man who undertakes to propound any subject whatever, to take care that each separate thought shall assume its proper place in his arrangement, and be produced there with all the distinctness which it is possible to throw around it in that place,—at least for those who can appreciate distinct language, and are capable of following a connected discourse; and I shall use my most earnest efforts to fulfil this duty.

With this first and only premonition, let us now, without farther delay, proceed to our subject.

A philosophical picture of the Present Age is what we have promised in these lectures. But that view only can be called philosophical which refers back the multiform phenomena which lie before us in experience to the unity of one common principle, and, on the other hand, from that one principle can deduce and completely explain those phenomena. The mere Empiricist who should undertake a description of the Age would seize upon some of its most striking phenomena, just as they presented themselves to casual observation, and recount these, without having any assured conviction that he had understood them all, and without being able to point out any other connexion between them than their coëxistence in one and the same time. The Philosopher who should propose to himself the task of such a description would, independently of all experience, seek out an Idea of the Age (which indeed in its own form,—as Idea,—cannot be apparent in experience), and exhibit the mode in which this Idea would reveal itself under the forms of the necessary phenomena of the Age; and in so doing he would distinctly exhaust the circle of these phenomena, and bring them forth in necessary connexion with each other, through the