Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/74

 approval on the sacrifice of personal enjoyment for the sake of Ideas manifested in all these examples, is the question which I must now leave you to answer for yourselves, and also to draw from this phenomenon the inferences which, as we formerly maintained, must necessarily follow from it.

This approval is, as we formerly explained, the immediate effect of the contemplation of the Life in Idea merely in conception, and as a condition foreign to ourselves. We added that the existence of this Life, not in conception only, but in living reality, was the source of an infinite self-enjoyment, which is Blessedness; and we promised a description of this state, which may indeed prove but weak and inadequate, as every mere picture of a living reality must prove.

This is the place more definitely to explain the peculiar nature of the Idea as such;—an explanation for which we have endeavoured to prepare the way by our previous course of thought.

I say, then, that the Idea is an independent, living, matter-inspiring Thought.

First,—an independent Thought: Herein, indeed, consists the perverted way of thinking of the Third Age, and generally every perverted way of thinking,—that it ascribes independence, self-reliance, and self-subsistence to mere dead and torpid matter, and then superadds to that the quite superfluous quality of thought, one knows not why or how. No! Thought itself is alone truly independent and self-existent;—not indeed the thought which belongs to the single thinking Individual, which truly cannot be self-existent,—but the One Eternal Thought, in which all Individuals are but Thoughts. The innermost root of this world is not Death,—Death which, by gradual restriction and limitation of its power, may be refined and subtilized into Life;—but, on the contrary, Life is the root of the World, and what there seems to be Death is but a