Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/186

162 of the world of sense, the self who eats and talks, and has this name. It might be truer to say that I, the real, the deeper, the relatively impersonal, or, rather, if you like, the genuinely and essentially personal self, need, and so express myself in, the world of social business. All we human selves are thus one true organic self, in so far as we work together. And this organic self we all of us experience just in so far as we do toil together. But not even this larger self of society can fully express the vocation which constitutes me in my true, in my deeper personality. No, my true vocation is endless, is eternal. By it I am linked, not through a mere postulate, but through all my deeper self-consciousness, to the very essence of the divine personality. When I reflect upon this truth, lo! my earthly existence, in its darkness and limitations, vanishes from before my eyes. With you I stand in presence of the divinest of mysteries, the communion of all the spirits in the one self whose free act is the very heart’s blood of our spiritual being. Nay, must it not, then, thinks Fichte, must not this be true of us? We are dead, and our life is hid in God. He is the only self. His will is the only will; his self-assertion lives in our every deed and love; his restlessness trembles in every throb of our hearts; his joy thrills in every triumph of our courage.

Well, in this thought, thus eloquently suggested by the restless and unsatisfying Fichte, you have the beginnings of the post-Kantian German idealism. The question, “Who is the true self?” thus becomes central in thought. Kant had really made it so, when he made all reasonable experience a continual appeal of my momentary to my larger self. Fichte merely universalizes the problem. The world is the poem thus dreamed out by the inner life. Who, then, is the dreamer? That is the question of the romantic period of German speculation. If you remember this as the central problem in all that is to follow in