ever be able to conceive himself
otherwise than as a cog in a wheel. Fichte accepts the ego, or spirit,
as the ultimate and absolute principle, because it alone can give our
life worth and meaning. Thus he grounds his entire philosophy upon a
moral imperative which presents itself to the ego in an inner vision.
He also tells us that we can become immediately aware of the
pure activity of the ego, of our free action, in a similar act of
intellectual intuition. But we cannot know this free act unless we
perform it ourselves; no one can understand the idealistic philosophy
who is not free; hence philosophy begins with an act of freedom--_im
Anfang war die Tat_.

In order that we may rise to free action, opposition is needed, and
this we get in the spatial-temporal world of phenomena, or nature,
which the ego creates for itself in order to have resistance to
overcome. Fichte conceives of nature as "the material of our duty,"
as the obstacle against which the ego can exercise its freedom. There
could be no free action without something to act upon, and there could
be no purposive action without a world in which everything happens
according to law; and such a causal world we have in our phenomenal
order, which is the product of the absolute spiritual principle.
By the ego Fichte did not mean the subjective ego, the particular
individual self with all its idiosyncrasies, but the universal ego,
the reason that manifests itself in all conscious individuals as
universal and necessary truth. In his earlier period he did not define
his thought very carefully, but in time the absolute ego came to be
conceived as the principle of all life and consciousness, as
universal life, and ultimately identified with God. His philosophy is,
therefore, not subjective idealism, although it was so misinterpreted,
but objective idealism; nature is not the creation of the particular
individual ego, but the phenomenal expression, or reflection, in the
subject of the universal spiritual principle.

Upon such an idealistic world-view Fichte based the ethical teachings
through which he exercised a lasting influence upon the German people
and the history of human thought. The universal ego is a moral ego,
an ego with an ethical purpose, that realizes itself in nature and in
man; it is, therefore, the vocation of man to obey the voice of duty
and to free himself from the bondage of nature, to be a person, not a
thing, to cooeperate in the realization of