Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/38

 already remarked, embraces only the relations and life of the Race as such, not the life of the Individual. In the latter the natural impulse of self-preservation and personal wellbeing alone prevails. Hence an Age which has thrown off Reason as Instinct, without accepting Reason in any other form in its stead, has absolutely nothing remaining except the life of the Individual, and whatever is connected with or related to that. Let us further explain this weighty conclusion, which is of essential importance to our future inquiries.

We have said that Reason as Instinct, and generally Reason in any form, embraces only the life and relations of the Race. To wit,—and this is a principle the proof of which cannot be brought forward here, but which is produced only as an axiom borrowed from the higher philosophy where the strict proof of it may be found,—there is but existing, even in reference to the subject; i.e. there is everywhere but animating power,  living Reason;—not, as we are accustomed to hear the unity of Reason asserted and admitted, that Reason is the one homogeneous and self-accordant faculty and property of reasonable beings, who do nevertheless exist already upon their own account, and to whose being this property of Reason is only superadded as a foreign ingredient, without which they might, at any rate, still have been;—but, that Reason is the only possible independent and self-sustaining Existence and Life, of which all that seems to us to exist and live is but a modification, definition, variety, and form. To you this principle is not altogether new, for it was already contained in the definition of Reason which I laid before you in our first lecture, to which I then particularly directed your attention and besought you to fix it in your mind. And now to explain this principle somewhat further, so that I may at least make it historically clear to you, although I cannot prove it in this place:—it is the greatest error, and the true ground of all the other errors which