Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/23

 and active there, only without insight into the grounds of its activity; or, in other words, may exist as mere feeling, for so we call consciousness without insight.

In short, to express this in common language:—Reason acts as blind Instinct, where it cannot as yet act through Free Will. It acts thus in the first Epoch of the Life of Mankind on Earth; and this first Epoch is thereby more closely characterized and more strictly defined.

By means of this stricter definition of the first Epoch, we are also enabled, by contrast, more strictly to define the second. Instinct is blind;—a consciousness without insight. Freedom, as the opposite of Instinct, is thus seeing, and clearly conscious of the grounds of its activity. But the sole ground of this free activity is Reason;—Freedom is thus conscious of Reason, of which Instinct was unconscious. Hence, between the dominion of Reason through mere Instinct, and the dominion of the same Reason through Freedom, there arises an intermediate condition,—the Consciousness or Knowledge of Reason.

But further:—Instinct as a blind impulse excludes Knowledge; hence the birth of Knowledge presupposes a liberation from the compulsive power of Instinct as already accomplished; and thus between the dominion of Reason as Instinct and that of Reason as Knowledge, there is interposed a third condition,—that of Liberation from Reason as Instinct.

But how could humanity free itself, or even wish to free itself, from that Instinct which is the law of its existence, and rules it with beloved and unobtrusive power?—or how could the one Reason which while it speaks in Instinct, is likewise active in the impulse towards Freedom,—how could this same Reason come into conflict and opposition with itself in human life? Clearly not directly; and hence a new medium must intervene between the dominion of Reason as Instinct, and the impulse to cast off that dominion. This medium arises in the following way:—the