olute Spirit as Moral Activity.]

Sect. 177. It is the last of these phases of self-consciousness that
Fichte, who was Kant's immediate successor, regards as of paramount
importance. As Platonism began with the ideal of the good or the object
of life, so the new idealism begins with the conviction of duty, or _the
story of life_. Being is the living moral nature compelled to build
itself a natural order wherein it may obey the moral law, and to divide
itself into a community of moral selves through which the moral virtues
may be realized. Nature and society flow from the conception of an
absolute moral activity, or ego. Such an ego could not be pure and
isolated and yet be moral. The evidence of this is the common moral
consciousness. My duty compels me to act upon the not-self or
environment, and to respect and cooperate with other selves. Fichte's
absolute is this moral consciousness universalized and made eternal.
Moral value being its fundamental principle the universe must on that
very account embrace both nature, or moral indifference, and humanity,
or moral limitation.

[Sidenote: Romanticism, or the Absolute Spirit as Sentiment.]

Sect. 178. But the Romanticists, who followed close upon Fichte, were
dissatisfied with so hard and exclusive a conception of spiritual being.
Life, they said, is not all duty. Indeed, the true spiritual life is
quite other, not harsh and constrained, but free and spontaneous--a
wealth of feeling playing about a constantly shifting centre. Spirit is
not consecutive and law-abiding, but capricious and wanton, seeking the
beautiful in no orderly progression, but in a refined and versatile
sensibility. If this be the nature of spirit, and if spirit be the
nature of reality, then he is most wise who is most rich in sentiment.
The Romanticists were the exponents of an absolute sentimentalism. And
they did not prove it, but like good sentimentalists they felt it.

[Sidenote: Hegelianism, or the Absolute Spirit as Dialectic.]

Sect. 179. Hegel, the master of the new idealism, set himself the task
of construing spirit in terms as consecutive as those of Fichte, and as
comprehensive as those of the Romanticists. Like Plato, he found in
dialectic the supreme manifestation of the spiritual life. There is a
certain flow of ideas which determines the meaning of experience, and
is the truth of truths. But the mark of the new prophet is this: the
flow of ideas itself is _a process of self-correct