Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/77

 satisfied with this worth, without demanding any ulterior results. The uncertainty of such results can thus never cloud its inward brightness, nor the actual want of them cause it grief; for it has never counted upon outward consequences, but on the contrary has resigned them along with every other desire of sense. How could sorrow, pain, or disturbance ever enter within the circle of a Life thus strictly comprehended within itself?

The Idea is sufficient in itself for the living, active Life which eternally flows forth from it, without need of aught else, and without allowing aught else to exercise an influence within it. The consciousness of this ever-present independence; this self-sufficiency for infinite and unceasing activity; the purity of this sacred, self-fed flame, which with steady and unvarying power burns onward through Eternity,—is the love of the Life of Reason for itself, its self-enjoyment, its Blessedness. No idle brooding over its own image, no contemplation of its own excellence;—for reflection is swallowed up in fact, and the unresting, ever-burning flame of real Life, having annihilated the Past and sunk it into the depths of oblivion, leaves neither time nor opportunity again to recall it thence.

To those in whom the Idea has never attained to life in any form, such delineations of the Blessedness of the Life in Idea are wholly unintelligible—tones from another world; and—since they necessarily deny the existence of any world but their own,—dreams, folly, and fanaticism. But are we not entitled to calculate with some measure of certainty that in cultivated society every one has in some way or other come into contact with Ideas?

As the Idea is simple in its nature, so is the Blessedness of the Life in the Idea everywhere one and the same;—namely, the immediate consciousness of original spontaneous Energy. It is only in relation to the objects on which this Energy descends, and in which it reveals itself within