Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/51

 LECTURE III. THE LIFE ACCORDING TO REASON.

is only by degrees that clearness can spread itself over our inquiry;—only step by step can light penetrate its deeper recesses; until at length the end reveal itself before us in unclouded brightness. This condition of our inquiry lies, as we said in our first lecture, in the unchangeable laws which regulate all communication of thought. Beyond the duty incumbent on the speaker to arrange his thoughts in their proper order, and to set each in its proper place, his art can do nothing to modify the condition of which we have spoken, except this,—heedfully to pause at each brighter point which presents itself in the course of his communication, and from thence to send forth rays of light upon what has gone before and what is to follow.

In our last lecture we arrived at one of these brighter points in the inquiry which we have undertaken; and it is fit and proper that we should to-day more fully develope this point. That the should order all its relations with Freedom according to Reason;—this was set forth as the end and purpose of the Earthly Life of our ; and the characteristic peculiarity of the Third Age, which it is our business to describe, was declared to be, that it had thrown off the yoke of Reason in every shape. But what Reason itself is, and in what a Life according