Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/28

 was the purpose of to-day’s address. Allow me, further, a few words on the external form of these discourses.

Whatever maybe our judgment upon the Present Age, and in whatever Epoch we may feel ourselves compelled to place it, you are not to expect here either the tone of lamentation or of satire, particularly of a personal description. Not of lamentation:—for it is the sweetest reward of Philosophy that, looking upon all things in their mutual dependence, and upon nothing as isolated and alone, she finds all to be necessary and therefore good, and accepts that which is, as it is, because it is subservient to a higher end. Besides, it is unmanly to waste in lamentation over existing evil the time which would be more wisely applied in striving, so far as in us lies, to create the Good and the Beautiful. Not of satire:—an infirmity which affects the whole race, is no proper object for the scorn of an individual who belongs to that race, and who, before he could depict it, must himself have known it and cast it off. But individuals disappear altogether from the view of the philosopher, and are lost in the one great commonwealth. His thought embraces all objects in a clear and consequential light, which they can never attain amid the endless fluctuations of reality;—hence it does not concern itself with individuals and, never descending to portraits, dwells in the higher sphere of idealized conception. As to the advantages derivable from considerations of this kind, it will be better to leave you to judge for yourselves after you have gone through some considerable portion of them, than to say much in praise of them beforehand. No one is further than the philosopher from the vain desire that his Age should be impelled forward to some obvious extent through his exertions. Every one, indeed, to whom God has given strength and opportunity, should exert all his powers for this end, were it only for his own sake, and in order to maintain the place which has been assigned to him in the ever-flowing current of existence. For the rest, Time rolls on in the steadfast