Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/181

 principle which we have laid down is applicable without any limitation.

To raise themselves with freedom to this Absolute State, as one of the conditions imposed by Reason on the Human Race, is the vocation of Mankind. This gradual elevation could take place neither in the state of Innocence among the Normal People, nor in the state of original Barbarism among the Savages.

Not among the former:—there men found themselves in the most perfect social relations, without need of any restraint or superintendence: every one acted justly and for the common advantage, spontaneously and without reflection on his own part, or on the part of any one else for him; and without this condition being first brought about either by his own skill or by any process of nature:—we have here no trace of a new genesis. Neither could this occur among the latter:—there each individual cared only for himself; and indeed only for his lower, merely animal, wants; and no one rose to the conception of any higher enjoyment. Consequently it was only in the commingling of the two original tribes of our Race, as the Actual Human Race of History, that the development of the State could begin and be carried out.

The first condition of a State, and the first essential characteristic of our idea of it, as stated above, is this: That Freemen must at first become subject to the will and superintendence of other Freemen. Freemen, I say, in opposition to Slaves: and by Freemen I mean those to whose own skill and judgment it is left to provide the means of subsistence for themselves and their families; who are accordingly sovereign heads of families, and even continue to be so after their submission to a foreign will which has other purposes in view. A Slave, on the contrary, is he to whom there is not left even the care for his own subsistence, but who is maintained by another, and in return becomes subject with his whole