Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/86

 help loving it, in so far as it rules as an unconscious power within Humanity itself. Hence this constraint must, in the first place, assume the form of an External Authority, and impose itself on Humanity with outward compulsion and power, as the foreign Instinct of a few Individuals; against which External Authority, Humanity now rises in opposition and sets itself free—primarily from this External Authority itself, but, at the same time, from Reason also in the form of Instinct; and—since Reason has not yet appeared in any other form,—from Reason altogether.

From this principle we arrived at five great and only possible Epochs, exhausting the whole Earthly Life of the Human Race:—First, That in which human affairs are governed by Reason as Instinct without violence or constraint. Second, That in which this Instinct has become weaker, and now only manifests itself in a few chosen Individuals, and thereby becomes an External Ruling Authority for all the rest. Third, That in which this Authority is thrown off; and, with it, Reason in every shape which it has yet assumed. Fourth, That in which Reason in the shape of Knowledge appears among men. Fifth, That in which Art associates itself with Knowledge, in order to mould Human Life with a firmer and surer hand into harmony with Knowledge, and in which the ordering of all the relations of Man according to Reason is, by means of this Art, freely accomplished, the object of the Earthly Life attained, and our Race enters upon the higher spheres of another World.

We chose for the principal subject-matter of these discourses the characteristics of the Third of the Epochs above mentioned, in consequence of the opinion which we expressed that the Present Age stands in this Third Epoch:—of the correctness or incorrectness of which opinion we left you entirely to judge for yourselves.

This Third Epoch, as the declared foe of all blind Instinct