in Fichte's too
much forgotten but unforgettable books "Bestimmung des Menschen" and
"Anweisung zum seeligen Leben," and it is thus a new creation of the great
German idealism and its mighty faith. And it is not easy to see why it
should be abandoned, why we should give it up in favour of an irreligious,
semi-naturalistic outlook on the world.

One thing, however, must be kept constantly in mind: even such an
interpretation of the world as this is poetry, not knowledge. There is a
poetry of the will to live, of the unconscious, which is struggling
towards existence, but there is no philosophy. There are only analogies
and hints of what goes on at the foundations of the world. In particular,
the unconscious creative impulse in all living organisms, this "will"
towards form, its relationship with instinct and the relationship of
instinct to conscious psyche, afford us a step-ladder of illustrations,
and an illustration of the step-ladder of the "will towards existence,"
which invite us to overstep the bounds of our knowledge, and indulge in
our imagination. We can say nothing of pre-conscious consciousness and
will, we can at best only make guesses about them. We cannot think
definitely of a general world-will, which wills and aspires in individual
beings; we cannot picture to ourselves the emergence of the individual
"souls" of animals and man from a universal psyche. Imagination plays a
larger part here than clear thinking. And for our present purpose it must
be clearly borne in mind that religion does not require any speculative
construction of theories of the world. But "you shall know that it is your
imagination which creates the world for you."(108) And if a speculative
construction be desired, it will always be most easily attained along
these lines, and will in this way come nearest to our modern knowledge of
nature. We must remember, too, that the objections which may be urged
against this form of speculation are equally applicable against any other.
For the origin of the individual psyche, the graduated series of its
forms, the development of one after the other, and of that of the child
from that of its parents, are riddles which cannot be solved by any
speculative thinking. Monadology, theories of the pre-existence of the
soul, creationism, or the current traducianism--which to-day, with its
partly or wholly materialistic basis, is just as naive as the older--all
reveal equal darkness. But the speculation we ha