Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/41

 fundamental law lie all those higher Ideas which belong to the One Life, or to the form which the One Life here assumes,—viz. the :—which Ideas altogether transcend Individuality, and indeed radically subvert it. Where this fundamental law does not prevail under one form or another, there can Humanity never attain to the One Life,—to the ; and hence nothing remains but Individuality as the only actual and efficient power. An Age which has set itself free from Reason as Instinct, the first principle of the Life of the Race, and does not yet possess Knowledge, the second principle of that Life, must find itself in this position:—with nothing remaining in it but mere naked Individuality. The Race, which alone possesses real existence, is here changed into a mere empty abstraction which has no true life, except in the artificial conception of some individual founded only on the strength of his own imaginings; and there is no other Whole, and indeed no other conceivable Whole, except a patchwork of individual parts, possessing no essential and organic Unity.

This individual and personal life, which is thus all that remains in such an Age, is governed by the impulse towards self-preservation and personal well-being; and Nature goes no further in man than this impulse. She bestows upon the animals a special instinct to guide them to the means of their preservation and well-being, but she sends forth man almost wholly uninstructed on this point, and refers him for guidance to his understanding and his experience; and therefore it could not fail that this latter should in the course of time, during the first two Epochs, assume a cultivated form, and gradually become an established art;—the art, namely, of promoting to the utmost self-preservation and personal well-being. This form of Reason,—this standard of conceptions,—the results, present in the general consciousness of the Time, of the art of Being and Well-Being, is what the third Age encounters at its advent;—this is the universal and natural Common Sense, which it