Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/87

 and of all Authority, takes this maxim as its motto:—‘Accept nothing but what is understood,’—that is, understood immediately, and by means of the previously existing and hereditary Common Sense. Could we lay open the true nature of this Common Sense, which the Third Epoch assumes as the standard of all its thoughts and opinions, we should then have a clear analysis of its whole system of thought and opinion.

This also we have accomplished. Reason in whatever shape it reveals itself, whether as Instinct or as Knowledge, always necessarily embraces the Life of the as a ;—Reason being thrown off and extinguished, nothing remains but the mere individual, personal life. Hence in the Third Age, which has set itself free from Reason, there is nothing remaining but this latter life; nothing, wherever the Age has thoroughly manifested itself and arrived at clearness and consistency, except pure, naked Egoism; and hence it naturally follows that the inborn and established Common Sense of the Third Age can be nothing else, and can contain nothing else, than the wisdom which provides for its personal well-being.

The means of the support and well-being of the personal life can only be discovered by Experience, since man has no direct guide thereto, either in an animal instinct such as the beasts possess; or in Reason which has for its object only the Life of the Race: and hence the assumption of Experience as the only source of knowledge is a characteristic trait of such an Age.

From this principle there arise further those views of Knowledge, of Art, of the Social Relations of Men, of Morality, and of Religion, which we have in like manner adduced as prevailing characteristics of such an Age.

In one word: the permanent and fundamental peculiarity and characteristic of such an Age is this,—that every genuine product of it thinks and does all that he actually thinks and does solely for himself and for his own peculiar