Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/180

156 Paul said, was of the air, — in presence of this waywardness, the world is once for all plastic, changeable; a world of divine or of diabolical ideas, but of ideas that are not so much eternal as capricious. Fichte makes this ideal world a moral one. Others, as we shall see, will find this universe of the selves a universe of romance, of sentimentality, of anything but hard fact. Yet think not that this capricious world utterly lacks truth. The real world, too, once for all flows; flows and changes throughout its whole existence, as Heraclitus long ago said; and preserves, too, its sacred and permanent logos just by changing. Well, it is the office of the wayward to note the various aspects of just this change, this plasticity, this seemingly hopeless variety, under which the eternal truth presents itself to us. In the world of the wayward, nothing seems fast. View follows view, romantic theory chases romantic theory, until we begin to fear that nothing is true, and that here, even as in Hume’s skeptical world also, if we find the Holy Grail itself, “it, too, will fade, and crumble into dust.” But, if we watch patiently, we shall see that, from this very wealth of forms, the true form which is present through all the changes will in some fashion ultimately come to light. Fichte’s moral universe, where matter is only our duty made manifest to our senses, and the universe of the romantic school, where all is sentiment, are, after all, fragments of the true faith. That thought is the thread which is to guide us through the labyrinth. The truth is the whole. Even the fantastic has its part therein.

But let us look a second time and more closely at Fichte’s view. The only perfectly clear thing, he says, at the outset of philosophy, is that there is a self. Any self will of course do, but some self one must start with, namely, of course, his own. Now a self asserts, “I am.”