Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/85

 LECTURE V. FARTHER DELINEATION OF THE THIRD AGE.

from a digression through which we promised ourselves additional light upon our way, we resume the straight path of our inquiry. Let us once more cast a glance over the purpose of this inquiry as a whole.

It is the end of the Earthly Life of the Human to order all its relations with Freedom according to Reason. To do this with Freedom, with a Freedom of which the shall be conscious, and which it shall recognise as its own, presupposes a condition in which this Freedom had not yet appeared;—not that the relations of the  have at any time not been ordered according to Reason, for in that case there could have been no ; but only that this ordering has not been accomplished by Freedom, but by Reason as a blind power; that is, by Reason as Instinct. Instinct is blind; its opposite, Freedom, must therefore be seeing;—that is, must be a Knowledge of the laws of Reason according to which the is to order its relations by means of its own unconstrained activity and art. In order that the may be able to attain to Reason as Knowledge, and from thence to Reason as Art, it must in the first place set itself free from the blind dominion of Reason as Instinct. But far from having even a wish to free itself from this constraint, Humanity