Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/43

 therefore begin our description of the Third Age at its latter stage—when its mode of thought has elevated itself to theory.

We have already remarked that Nature has not bestowed upon man, as it has upon animals, a particular instinct whereby he may be led to the means of his preservation and well-being. This being the case, and also because nothing can be learned upon this subject from a priori Ideas, which relate only to the One and Everlasting Life of the Race, it follows, that in this province nothing remains for man but to try, or to let others try at their own proper cost, what is good for him and what evil, and to note the result for his guidance at a future time. Hence it is quite natural and necessary that an Age whose whole theory of the world is exhausted in the means of personal existence, should value Experience as the only possible source of Knowledge, since those very means, which are all that such an Age can or will recognise, are only to be recognised through Experience. In mere Experience,—from which however we must carefully distinguish scientific Observation and Experiment, with which an a priori Idea is always associated, that, namely, of the object of inquiry,—in mere Experience there is contained nothing but the means of physical preservation, and on the other hand these means can only be recognised by Experience:—hence it is Experience alone from which this Age derives its views of the world; and the world again, as seen by it, points to Experience as its sole original;—and thus they react upon each other with the same result. Such an Age is thus obliged to deny and deride all the knowledge which we possess a priori and independent of Experience, and the assertion that from knowledge itself, without intermixture of any sensuous element, new knowledge may originate and flow forth. Did it possess Ideas of a higher world and its order, then it would easily understand that these are founded on no Experience whatever, since they transcend all Experience; or if, on the other hand, it had