ntimental Poetry_, 1795-96;
and the _Letters on Aesthetic Education_, intermediate between them. Cf.
Kuno Fischer, _Schiller als Philosoph_, 1858, 2d ed. (_Schillerschriften_,
iii., iv.) 1891-92.]

CHAPTER X.

FICHTE.

Fichte is a Kantian in about the same sense that Plato was a Socratic.
Instead of taking up and developing particular critical problems he
makes the vivifying kernel, the soul of criticism, his own. With the
self-activity of reason (as a real force and as a problem) for his
fundamental idea, he outlines with magnificent boldness a new view of the
world, in which the idealism concealed in Kant's philosophy under the
shell of cautious limitations was roused into vigorous life, and the great
Koenigsberger's noble words on the freedom, the position, and the power of
the spirit translated from the language of sober foresight into that of
vigorous enthusiasm. The world can be understood only from the standpoint
of spirit, the spirit only from the will. The ego is pure activity, and all
reality its product. Fichte's system is all life and action: its aim is not
to mediate knowledge, but to summon the hearer and reader to the production
of a new and pregnant fundamental view, in which the will is as much
a participant as the understanding; it begins not with a concept or a
proposition, but with a demand for action (posit thyself; do consciously
what thou hast done unconsciously so often as thou hast called thyself I;
analyze, then, the act of self-consciousness, and cognize in their elements
the forces from which all reality proceeds); its God is not a completed
absolute substance, but a self-realizing world-order. This inner vivacity
of the Fichtean principle, which recalls the pure actuality of Aristotle's
[Greek: nous] and the ceaseless becoming of Heraclitus, finds its complete
parallel in the fact that, although he was wanting neither in logical
consecutiveness nor in the talent for luminous and popular exposition,
Fichte felt continually driven to express his ideas in new forms, and, just
when he seemed to have succeeded in saying what he meant with the greatest
clearness, again unsatisfied, to seek still more exact and evident
renderings for his fundamental position, which proved so difficult to
formulate.

The author of the _Wissenschaftslehre_ was the son of a poor ribbon maker,
and was born at Rammenau in Lusatia in 1762. The talents of the boy induced
the Freiherr von Miltiz to give him the adv