Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/296

 just as each of you might have done for himself, had he had time and aptitude for meditation on matters of this description. It became my business to apply a portion of my time to the production and adjustment of such a discourse as each of you might have addressed to himself, and which he must actually address to himself at last, testing it by his own sense of Truth, if it is really to be addressed to him at all. At most, I could thus only lend some assistance to my hearers, by removing the opposition between their spiritual condition at the time when the Religious Sense first developed itself within them, and that in which they now stand; by separating distinctly and forcibly this Religious Sense itself, which is at all times essentially one and the same, from the casual and diverse limitations which surrounded its first development, and planting it, beyond these limitations, into their present state of mental culture.

There is, in the first place, one good criterion by which we may arrive at a preliminary solution at least of the question we have proposed,—Whether the considerations which we have here set forth have been mere empty verbiage, or intellectual conceits, serviceable at most to pass away an idle hour?—or whether they have come home to something already living within ourselves?—this, namely,—if we have been conscious that our own long-cherished presentiments and feelings have here been distinctly spoken forth, and that we ourselves had previously thought of the matter almost exactly as it has been here expounded;—then we may be sure that something already living within us has been touched. This, I say, is but a preliminary and even but a partially decisive criterion. It is indecisive on the following account:—one man may cordially assent to it in whom only a fugitive scientific or aesthetic pleasure has been excited, which indeed may manifest itself in a more consistent view of the world, or in more inspired productions