Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/55

 This, namely:—If you yourselves, compelled by an inward power, should feel it impossible to withhold your approval, your admiration, and your reverence from a Life such as we have described, and were even compelled to reverence it more profoundly the greater and more evident the sacrifices made at the shrine of Ideas,—so surely, I say, would it be obvious, from this your approval, that there is a principle, indestructibly rooted in your minds, which proclaims that the personal life ought to be brought a sacrifice to the Idea, and that the Life in which it is so offered up is the only true and upright Life;—hence, if we regard the matter strictly,—that the individual life has no real existence, since it has no value of itself, but must and should sink to nothing; while, on the contrary, the Race alone exists, since it alone ought to be looked upon as really living. In this way we should keep the promise we gave in our former lecture, to show you, in a popular way and by your own knowledge of yourselves, that the principle which we then announced, and which at first sight seemed so paradoxical, was in truth already well known and admitted by you, and indeed was the constant director and guide of your judgment, although you might not be clearly conscious of it;—and we should thus attain both the objects which I had in view in the present lecture.

That you should actually be necessitated to approve, admire, and reverence such a Life as we have described, was the first step in our argument, upon which all else depended, and from which all else necessarily followed;—and this we must commit entirely to your own reflection, without interference on our part. Hence it is only my task to make an experiment on you and within you, and should this succeed, as I expect it will, then we shall have proved our position.

I shall make this experiment upon your minds, unquestionably with the view of exciting a certain feeling in you; but not so as to take you unawares, or to excite this