Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/204

 that the barren Speculation may, at one time or other, lead to some useful discovery; or from receiving the protection of the Church; or even that of Medicine, since every man would willingly live as long and enjoy as good health as possible.

Finally, Virtue can be no object of the State. Virtue is the constant and all-directing Good-will which strives to promote with all its power the purposes of the Human Race; and in the State particularly to promote these purposes in the way prescribed by it;—the desire and love to do this, and an unconquerable aversion to any other course of action. But the State, in its essential character of a compulsive power, calculates upon the absence of Good-will, and therefore upon the absence of Virtue, and upon the presence of Evil-will;—it supplies the want of the former, and represses the out-break of the latter, by fear of punishment. Strictly confining itself to this sphere, it has no need to calculate upon Virtue, nor to take it into account for the accomplishment of its purposes. Were all its members virtuous it would lose its character of a compulsive power altogether, and become the mere Leader, Guide, and true Counsellor of the willing.

Nevertheless the State, by its mere existence, conduces to the possibility of a general development of Virtue throughout the Human Race,—although, strictly considered, it does not expressly make this its purpose except as concealed under another form,—by the production of external good manners and morality, which indeed are yet far off from Virtue. Under a Legislation which should strictly and systematically embrace every possible crime against the outward Rights of the Citizens, and under an Administration from which actual crime could seldom or never conceal itself or escape the punishment threatened by the Law, every thought of crime, as something wholly vain and leading to nothing but certain punishment, would at once be stifled in its birth. When the Nation had lived in peace and quietness