Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/189

Rh fill it in his own fashion with the rarest treasures of truth. The real thing in itself, according to Fichte, is the active I, the Ego, the subject of self-consciousness. This each of us knows in his own person. To watch the activity of this great source of our being, to sound the depths of its endless nature, is to come to the true knowledge of God and of things which Spinoza already demanded for the wise man, and which Kant sought in vain in the external world. We and our world exist together. Our world is the expression of our character. As a man thinketh, so is he; but with equal truth, according to Fichte, as a man is, so thinks he. He sees himself in all he sees. And this self that a man sees crystallized in all his world of sense, of society, and of philosophy, is simply his own fashion of conduct, his busy world-building temperament. At the outset of life each personal self says, “I must exist, I will exist.” But no one can exist unless he is ready to act. My life, my existence, is in work. I toil for self-consciousness, and without toil no consciousness. But once more, also, I can only work if I have a task, something foreign to me, a not-self to influence and finally to conquer. Therefore it is, thinks Fichte, that I stand from the beginning in the presence of a world which seems external. My deeper self unconsciously produces this foreign world, and then bids me win my place therein. The material things yonder are therefore just the products of my unconscious activity. Their office it is to give me something to do; they are the outer embodiment of my duty; they are my moral law made manifest to sense. You and I see the same world about us merely because we, as moral beings, need and choose common tasks. And, in a deeper sense, the reason why you and I see the same world is that we are actually fragmentary manifestations of one infinite self, whose ultimate nature we can never fathom, but whose world is through and through a world of common tasks, — a world of a moral order, whereof we are all instruments.