Allusion has already been made to the question of the boundaries between logic and psychology, between logic and ethics, ethics and psychology, and psychology and epistemology. Each of these occasionally comes to cover ground that seems more appropriate to the others. Logic is sometimes restricted to denote the study of the conditions of derivative knowledge, of the canons of inference and the modes of proof. If taken more widely as the science of thought-form, it is supposed to imply a world of fixed or stereotyped relations between ideas, a system of stable thoughts governed by inflexible laws in an absolute order of immemorial or eternal truth. As against such fixity, psychology is supposed to deal with these same ideas as products—as growing out of a living process of thought—having a history behind them and perhaps a prospect of further change. The genesis so given may be either a mere chronicle-history, or it may be a philosophical development. In the former case, it would note the occasions of incident and circumstance, the reactions of mind and environment, under which the ideas were formed. Such [pg xcv] a psychological genesis of several ideas is found in the Second Book of Locke's Essay. In the latter case, the account would be more concerned with the inner movement, the action and reaction in ideas themselves, considered not as due to casual occurrences, but as self-developing by an organic growth. But in either case, ideas would be shown not to be ready-made and independently existing kinds in a world of idea-things, and not to form an unchanging diagram or framework, but to be a growth, to have a history, and a development. Psychology in this sense would be a dynamical, as opposed to the supposed statical, treatment of ideas and concepts in logic. But it may be doubted how far it is well to call this psychology: unless psychology deals with the contents of the mental life, in their meaning and purpose, instead of, as seems proper, merely in their character of psychic events. Such psychology is rather an evolutionist logic,—a dialectic process more than an analytic of a datum.
In the same way, ethics may be brought into one kind of contact with psychology. Ethics, like logic, may be supposed to presuppose and to deal with a certain inflexible scheme of requirements, a world of moral order governed by invariable or universal law; an eternal kingdom of right, existing independently of human wills, but to be learned and followed out in uncompromising obedience. As against this supposed absolute order, psychology may be said to show the genesis of the idea of obligation and duty, the growth of the authority of conscience, the formation of ideals, the relativity of moral ideas. Here also it may reach this conclusion, by a more external or a more internal mode of argument. It may try to show, in other words, that circumstances give rise to these forms of estimating conduct, or it may argue that they are a necessary [pg xcvi] development in the human being, constituted as he is. It may again be doubted whether this is properly called psychology. Yet its purport seems ultimately to be that the objective order is misconceived when it is regarded as an external or quasi-physical order: as a law written up and sanctioned with an external authority—as, in Kant's words, a heteronomy. If that order is objective, it is so because it is also in a sense subjective: if it is above the mere individuality of the individual, it is still in a way identical with his true or universal self-hood. Thus “psychological” here means the recognition that the logical and the moral law is an autonomy: that it is not given, but though necessary, necessary by the inward movement of the mind. The metaphor of law is, in brief, misleading. For, according to a common, though probably an erroneous, analysis of that term, the essence of a law in the political sphere is to be a species of command. And that is rather a one-sidedly practical or aesthetic way of looking at it. The essence of law in general, and the precondition of every law in special, is rather uniformity and universality, self-consistency and absence of contradiction: or, in other words, rationality. Its essential opposite—or its contradiction in essence—is a privilege, an attempt at isolating a case from others. It need not indeed always require bare uniformity—require i.e. the same act to be done by different people: but it must always require that every thing within its operation shall be treated on principles of utter and thorough harmony and consistency. It requires each thing to be treated on public principles and with publicity: nothing apart and mere singular, as a mere incident or as a world by itself. Differently it may be treated, but always on grounds of common well-being, as part of an embracing system.
There is probably another sense, however, in which [pg xcvii] psychology comes into close relation with ethics. If we look on man as a microcosm, his inner system will more or less reproduce the system of the larger world. The older psychology used to distinguish an upper or superior order of faculties from a lower or inferior. Thus in the intellectual sphere, the intellect, judgment, and reason were set above the senses, imagination, and memory. Among the active powers, reasonable will, practical reason and conscience were ranked as paramount over the appetites and desires and emotions. And this use of the word “faculty” is as old as Plato, who regards science as a superior faculty to opinion or imagination. But this application—which seems a perfectly legitimate one—does not, in the first instance, belong to psychology at all. No doubt it is psychically presented: but it has an other source. It springs from an appreciation, a judgment of the comparative truth or reality of what the so-called psychical act means or expresses. Such faculties are powers in a hierarchy of means and ends and presuppose a normative or critical function which has classified reality. Psychically, the elements which enter into knowledge are not other than those which belong to opinion: but they are nearer an adequate rendering of reality, they are truer, or nearer the Idea. And in the main we may say, that is truer or more real which succeeds in more completely organising and unifying elements—which rises more and more above the selfish or isolated part into the thorough unity of all parts.
The superior faculty is therefore the more thorough organisation of that which is elsewhere less harmoniously systematised. Opinion is fragmentary and partial: it begins abruptly and casually from the unknown, and runs off no less abruptly into the unknown. Knowledge, on the contrary, is unified: and its unity gives it its [pg xcviii] strength and superiority. The powers which thus exist are the subjective counterparts of objectively valuable products. Thus, reason is the subjective counterpart of a world in which all the constituents are harmonised and fall into due relationship. It is a product or result, which is not psychologically, but logically or morally important. It is a faculty, because it means that actually its possessor has ordered and systematised his life or his ideas of things. Psychologically, it, like unreason, is a compound of elements: but in the case of reason the composition is unendingly and infinitely consistent; it is knowledge completely unified. The distinction then is not in the strictest sense psychological: for it has an aesthetic or normative character; it is logical or ethical: it denotes that the idea or the act is an approach to truth or goodness. And so, when Butler or Plato distinguishes reason or reflection from appetites and affections, and even from self-love or from the heart which loves and hates, this is not exactly a psychological division in the narrower sense. That is to say: these are, in Plato's words, not merely “parts,” but quite as much “kinds” and “forms” of soul. They denote degrees in that harmonisation of mind and soul which reproduces the permanent and complete truth of things. For example, self-love, as Butler describes it, has but a partial and narrowed view of the worth of acts: it is engrossing and self-involved: it cannot take in the full dependence of the narrower interest on the larger and eternal self. So, in Plato, the man of heart is but a nature which by fits and starts, or with steady but limited vision, realises the larger life. These parts or kinds are not separate and co-existent faculties: but grades in the co-ordination and unification of the same one human nature.
[pg xcix]Psychology however in the strict sense is extremely difficult to define. Those who describe it as the “science of mind,” the “phenomenology of consciousness,” seem to give it a wider scope than they really mean. The psychologist of the straiter sect tends, on the other hand, to carry us beyond mind and consciousness altogether. His, it has been said, is a psychology without a Psyché. For him Mind, Soul, and Consciousness are only current and convenient names to designate the field, the ground on which the phenomena he observes are supposed to transact themselves. But they must not on any account interfere with the operations; any more than Nature in general may interfere with strictly physical inquiries, or Life and vital force with the theories of biology. The so-called Mind is only to be regarded as a stage on which certain events represent themselves. In this field, or on this stage, there are certain relatively ultimate elements, variously called ideas, presentations, feelings, or states of consciousness. But these elements, though called ideas, must not be supposed more than mechanical or dynamical elements; consciousness is rather their product, a product which presupposes certain operations and relations between them. If we are to be strictly scientific, we must, it is urged, treat the factors of consciousness as not themselves conscious: we must regard them as quasi-objective, or in abstraction from the consciousness which surveys them. The Ego must sink into a mere receptacle or arena of psychic event; its independent meaning or purport is to be ignored, as beside the question.
When this line is once fixed upon, it seems inevitable to go farther. Comte was inclined to treat psychology [pg c] as falling between two stools: it must, he thought, draw all its content either from physiology on the one hand, or from social factors on the other. The dominant or experimental psychology of the present day seems inclined, without however formulating any very definite statement, to pronounce for the former alternative. It does not indeed adopt the materialistic view that mind is only a function of matter. Its standpoint rather is that the psychical presents itself even to unskilled observation as dependent on (i.e. not independent of) or as concomitant with certain physical or corporeal facts. It adds that the more accurately trained the observer becomes, the more he comes to discover a corporeal aspect even where originally he had not surmised its existence, and to conclude that the two cycles of psychical and physical event never interfere with each other: that soul does not intervene in bodily process, nor body take up and carry on psychical. If it is said that the will moves the limbs, he replies that the will which moves is really certain formerly unnoticed movements of nerve and muscle which are felt or interpreted as a discharge of power. If the ocular impression is said to cause an impression on the mind, he replies that any fact hidden under that phrase refers to a change in the molecules of the brain. He will therefore conclude that for the study of psychical phenomena the physical basis, as it may be called, is all important. Only so can observation really deal with fact capable of description and measurement. Thus psychology, it may be said, tends to become a department of physiology. From another standpoint, biology may be said to receive its completion in psychology. How much either phrase means, however, will depend on the estimate we form of biology. If biology is only the study of mechanical and chemical phenomena on the peculiar field known as [pg ci] an organism, and if that organism is only treated as an environment which may be ignored, then psychology, put on the same level, is not the full science of mind, any more than the other is the full study of life. They both have narrowed their subject to suit the abstract scheme of the laboratory, where the victim of experiment is either altered by mutilation and artificial restrictions, or is dead. If, on the contrary, biology has a substantial unity of its own to which mechanical and chemical considerations are subordinate and instrumental, psychology may even take part with physiology without losing its essential rank. But in that case, we must, as Spinoza said47, think less mechanically of the animal frame, and recognise (after the example of Schelling) something truly inward (i.e. not merely locally inside the skin) as the supreme phase or characteristic of life. We must, in short, recognise sensibility as the culmination of the physiological and the beginning of the psychological.
To the strictly scientific psychologist, as has been noted—or to the psychology which imitates optical and electrical science—ideas are only psychical events: they are not ideas of anything, relative, i.e. to something else; they have no meaning, and no reference to a reality beyond themselves. They are presentations;—not representations of something outside consciousness. They are appearances: but not appearances of something: they do not reveal anything beyond themselves. They are, we may almost say, a unique kind of physical phenomena. If we say they are presentations of something, we only mean that in the presented something, in the felt something, the wished something, we separate the quality or form or aspect of presentativeness, of [pg cii] feltness, of wishedness, and consider this aspect by itself. There are grades, relations, complications, of such presentations or in such presentedness: and with the description and explanation of these, psychology is concerned. They are fainter or stronger, more or less correlated and antithetical. Presentation (or ideation), in short, is the name of a train of event, which has its peculiarities, its laws, its systems, its history.
All reality, it may be said, subsists in such presentation; it is for a consciousness, or in a consciousness. All esse, in its widest sense, is percipi. And yet, it seems but the commonest of experiences to say that all that is presented is not reality. It is, it has a sort of being,—is somehow presumed to exist: but it is not reality. And this reference and antithesis to what is presented is implied in all such terms as “ideas,” “feelings,” “states of consciousness”: they are distinguished from and related to objects of sense or external facts, to something, as it is called, outside consciousness. Thoughts and ideas are set against things and realities. In their primitive stage both the child and the savage seem to recognise no such difference. What they imagine is, as we might say, on the same plane with what they touch and feel. They do not, as we reproachfully remark, recognise the difference between fact and fiction. All of us indeed are liable to lapses into the same condition. A strong passion, a keen hope or fear, as we say, invests its objects with reality: even a sanguine moment presents as fact what calmer reflection disallows as fancy. With natural and sane intelligences, however, the recrudescence of barbarous imagination is soon dispelled, and the difference between hallucinations and realities is established. With the utterly wrecked in mind, the reality of hallucinations becomes a permanent or habitual state. With the child and the untrained it [pg ciii] is a recurrent and a disturbing influence: and it need hardly be added that the circle of these decepti deceptores—people with the “lie in the Soul”—is a large one. There thus emerges a distinction of vast importance, that of truth and falsehood, of reality and unreality, or between representation and reality. There arise two worlds, the world of ideas, and the world of reality which it is supposed to represent, and, in many cases, to represent badly.
With this distinction we are brought across the problem sometimes called Epistemological. Strictly speaking, it is really part of a larger problem: the problem of what—if Greek compounds must be used—may be styled Aletheiology—the theory of truth and reality: what Hegel called Logic, and what many others have called Metaphysics. As it is ordinarily taken up, “ideas” are believed to be something in us which is representative or symbolical of something truly real outside us. This inward something is said to be the first and immediate object of knowledge48, and gives us—in a mysterious way we need not here discuss—the mediate knowledge of the reality, which is sometimes said to cause it. Ideas in the Mind, or in the Subject, or in us, bear witness to something outside the mind,—trans-subjective—beyond us. The Mind, Subject, or Ego, in this parallelism is evidently in some way identified with our corporeal organism: perhaps even located, and provided with a “seat,” in some defined space of that [pg civ] organism. It is, however, the starting-point of the whole distinction that ideas do not, no less than they do, conform or correspond to this supra-conscious or extra-conscious world of real things. Truth or falsehood arises, according to these assumptions, according as psychical image or idea corresponds or not to physical fact. But how, unless by some miraculous second-sight, where the supreme consciousness, directly contemplating by intuition the true and independent reality, turns to compare with this immediate vision the results of the mediate processes conducted along the organs of sense,—how this agreement or disagreement of copy and original, of idea and reality, can be detected, it is impossible to say.
As has been already noted, the mischief lies in the hypostatisation of ideas as something existing in abstraction from things—and, of things, in abstraction from ideas. They are two abstractions, the first by the realist, the second by the idealist called subjective and psychological. To the realist, things exist by themselves, and they manage to produce a copy of themselves (more or less exact, or symbolical) in our mind, i.e. in a materialistically-spiritual or a spiritualistically-material locus which holds “images” and ideas. To the psychological idealist, ideas have a substantive and primary right to existence, them alone do we really know, and from them we more or less legitimately are said (but probably no one takes this seriously) to infer or postulate a world of permanent things. Now ideas have no substantive existence as a sort of things, or even images of things anywhere. All this is pure mythology. It is said by comparative mythologists that in some cases the epithet or quality of some deity has been substantialised (hypostatised) into a separate god, who, however (so still to keep up the unity), is regarded [pg cv] as a relative, a son, or daughter, of the original. So the phrase “ideas of things” has been taken literally as if it was double. But to have an idea of a thing merely means that we know it, or think it. An idea is not given: it is a thing which is given in the idea. An idea is not an additional and intervening object of our knowledge or supposed knowledge. That a thing is our object of thought is another word for its being our idea, and that means we know it.
The distinction between truth and falsehood, between reality and appearance, is not arrived at by comparing what we have before us in our mind with some inaccessible reality beyond. It is a distinction that grows up with the growth and organisation of our presentations—with their gradual systematisation and unification in one consciousness. But this consciousness which thinks, i.e. judges and reasons, is something superior to the contrast of physical and psychical: superior, i.e. in so far as it includes and surveys the antithesis, without superseding it. It is the “transcendental unity of consciousness” of Kant—his synthetic unity of apperception. It means that all ideas ultimately derive their reality from their coherence with each other in an all-embracing or infinite idea. Real in a sense ideas always are, but with an imperfect reality. Thus the education to truth is not—such a thing would be meaningless—ended by a rough and ready recommendation to compare our ideas with facts: it must teach the art which discovers facts. And the teaching may have to go through many grades or provinces: in each of which it is possible to acquire a certain virtuosoship without being necessarily an adept in another. It is through what is called the development of intellect, judgment, and reasoning that the faculty of truth-detecting or truth-selecting comes. And the common feature of all [pg cvi] of these is, so to say, their superiority to the psychological mechanism, not in the sense of working without it and directly, but of being the organising unity or unifier and controller and judge of that mechanism. The certainty and necessity of truth and knowledge do not come from a constraint from the external thing which forces the inner idea into submission; they come from the inner necessity of conformity and coherence in the organism of experience. We in fact had better speak of ideas as experience—as felt reality: a reality however which has its degrees and perhaps even its provinces. All truth comes with the reasoned judgment, i.e. the syllogism—i.e. with the institution or discovery of relations of fact or element to fact or element, immediate or derivative, partial and less partial, up to its ideal coherence in one Idea. It is because this coherence is so imperfectly established in many human beings that their knowledge is so indistinguishable from opinion, and that they separate so loosely truth from error. They have not worked their way into a definitely articulated system, where there are no gaps, no abrupt transitions: their mental order is so loosely put together that divergences and contradictions which vex another drop off ineffectual from them.
This was the idealism which Kant taught and Fichte promoted. Of the other idealism there are no doubt abundant traces in the language of Kant: and they were greedily fastened on by Schopenhauer. To him the doctrine, that the world is my idea, is adequately represented when it is translated into the phrase that [pg cvii] the world is a phantasmagoria of my brain; and escape from the subjective idealism thus initiated is found by him only through a supposed revelation of immediate being communicated in the experience of will. But according to the more consistently interpreted Kant, the problem of philosophy consists in laying bare the supreme law or conditions of consciousness on which depend the validity of our knowledge, our estimates of conduct, and our aesthetic standards. And these roots of reality are for Kant in the mind—or, should we rather say—in mind—in “Consciousness in General.” In the Criticism of Pure Reason the general drift of his examination is to show that the great things or final realities which are popularly supposed to stand in self-subsistent being, as ultimate and all-comprehensive objects set up for knowledge, are not “things” as popularly supposed, but imperative and inevitable ideas. They are not objects to be known—(these are always finite): but rather the unification, the basis, or condition, and the completion of all knowledge. To know them—in the ordinary petty sense of knowledge—is as absurd and impossible as it would be, in the Platonic scheme of reality, to know the idea of good which is “on the further side of knowledge and being.” God and the Soul—and the same would be true of the World (though modern speculators sometimes talk as if they had it at least within their grasp)—are not mere objects of knowledge. It would be truer to say they are that by which we know, and they are what in us knows: they make knowledge possible, and actual. Kant has sometimes spoken of them as the objects of a faith of reason. What he means is that reason only issues in knowledge because of and through this inevitable law of reason bidding us go on for ever in our search, because there can be nothing isolated and nowhere [pg cviii] any ne plus ultra in science, which is infinite and yet only justified as it postulates or commands unity.
Kant's central idea is that truth, beauty, goodness, are not dependent on some qualities of the object, but on the universal nature or law of consciousness. Beauty is not an attribute of things in their abstractness: but of things as ideas of a subject, and depends on the proportion and symmetry in the play of human faculty. Goodness is not conformity to an outward law, but is obligatory on us through that higher nature which is our truer being. Truth is not conformity of ideas with supposed trans-subjective things, but coherence and stability in the system of ideas. The really infinite world is not out there, but in here—in consciousness in general, which is the denial of all limitation, of all finality, of all isolation. God is the essential and inherent unity and unifier of spirit and nature—the surety that the world in all its differentiations is one. The Soul is not an essential entity, but the infinite fruitfulness and freshness of mental life, which forbids us stopping at anything short of complete continuity and unity. The Kingdom of God—the Soul—the moral law—is within us: within us, as supreme, supra-personal and infinite intelligences, even amid all our littleness and finitude. Even happiness which we stretch our arms after is not really beyond us, but is the essential self which indeed we can only reach in detail. It is so both in knowledge and in action. Each knowledge and enjoyment in reality is limited and partial, but it is made stable, and it gets a touch of infinitude, by the larger idea which it helps to realise. Only indeed in that antithesis between the finite and the infinite does the real live. Every piece of knowledge is real, only because it assumes pro tempore certain premisses which are given: every actual beauty is set in some defect of aesthetic [pg cix] completeness: every actually good deed has to get its foil in surrounding badness. The real is always partial and incomplete. But it has the basis or condition of its reality in an idea—in a transcendental unity of consciousness, which is so to say a law, or a system and an order, which imposes upon it the condition of conformity and coherence; but a conformity which is essential and implicit in it.
Fichte has called his system a Wissenschaftslehre—a theory of knowledge. Modern German used the word Wissenschaft, as modern English uses the word Science, to denote the certified knowledge of piecemeal fact, the partial unification of elements still kept asunder. But by Wissen, as opposed to Erkennen, is meant the I know, am aware and sure, am in contact with reality, as opposed to the derivative and conditional reference of something to something else which explains it. The former is a wider term: it denotes all consciousness of objective truth, the certainty which claims to be necessary and universal, which pledges its whole self for its assertion. Fichte thus unifies and accentuates the common element in the Kantian criticisms. In the first of these Kant had begun by explaining the nature and limitation of empirical science. It was essentially conditioned by the given sensation—dependent i.e. on an unexplained and preliminary element. This is what makes it science in the strict or narrow sense of the term: its being set, as it were, in the unknown, the felt, the sense-datum. The side of reality is thus the side of limitation and of presupposition. But what makes it truth and knowledge in general, on the other hand,—as distinct from a truth (i.e. partial truth) and a knowledge,—is the ideal element—the mathematical, the logical, the rational law,—or in one word, the universal and formal character. So too every real action is on one hand the product of an [pg cx] impulse, a dark, merely given, immediate tendency to be, and without that would be nothing: but on the other hand it is only an intelligent and moral action in so far as it has its constitution from an intelligence, a formal system, which determine its place and function.
It is on the latter or ideal element that Kant makes the emphasis increasingly turn. Not truths, duties, beauties, but truth, duty, beauty, form his theme. The formal element—the logical or epistemological condition of knowledge and morality and of beauty—is what he (and still more Fichte) considers the prime question of fundamental philosophy. His philosophy is an attempt to get at the organism of our fundamental belief—the construction, from the very base, of our conception of reality, of our primary certainty. In technical language, he describes our essential nature as a Subject-object. It is the unity of an I am which is also I know that I am: an I will which is also I am conscious of my will49. Here there is a radical disunion and a supersession of that disunion. Action and contemplation are continually outrunning each other. The I will rests upon one I know, and works up to another: the I know reflects upon an I will, and includes it as an element in its idea.
Kant had brought into use the term Deduction, and Fichte follows him. The term leads to some confusion: for in English, by its modern antithesis to induction, it suggests a priori methods in all their iniquity. It means a kind of jugglery which brings an endless series [pg cxi] out of one small term. Kant has explained that he uses it in the lawyer's sense in which a claim is justified by being traced step by step back to some acknowledged and accepted right50. It is a regressive method which shows us that if the original datum is to be accepted it carries along with it the legitimation of the consequence. This method Fichte applies to psychology. Begin, he says like Condillac, with the barest nucleus of soul-life; the mere sentiency, or feeling: the contact, as it were, with being, at a single point. But such a mere point is unthinkable. You find, as Mr. Spencer says, that “Thought” (or Consciousness) “cannot be framed out of one term only.” “Every sensation to be known as one must be perceived.” Such is the nature of the Ego—a subject which insists on each part being qualified by the whole and so transformed. As Mr. Spencer, again, puts it, the mind not merely tends to revive, to associate, to assimilate, to represent its own presentations, but it carries on this process infinitely and in ever higher multiples. Ideas as it were are growing in complexity by re-presenting: i.e. by embracing and enveloping elements which cannot be found existing in separation. In the mind there is no mere presentation, no bare sensation. Such a unit is a fiction or hypothesis we employ, like the atom, for purposes of explanation. The pure sensation therefore—which you admit because you must have something to begin with, not a mere nothing, but something so simple that it seems to stand out clear and indisputable—this pure sensation, when you think of it, forces you to go a good deal further. Even to be itself, it must be more than itself. It is like the pure or mere being of the logicians. Admit the simple [pg cxii] sensation—and you have admitted everything which is required to make sensation a possible reality. But you do not—in the sense of vulgar logic—deduce what follows out of the beginning. From that, taken by itself, you will get only itself: mere being will give you only nothing, to the end of the chapter. But, as the phrase is, sensation is an element in a consciousness: it is, when you think of it, always more than you called it: there is a curious “continuity” about the phenomena, which makes real isolation impossible.
Of course this “deduction” is not history: it is logic. It says, if you posit sensation, then in doing so, you posit a good deal more. You have imagination, reason, and many more, all involved in your original assumption. And there is a further point to be noted. You cannot really stop even at reason, at intelligence and will, if you take these in the full sense. You must realise that these only exist as part and parcel of a reasonable world. An individual intelligence presupposes a society of intelligences. The successive steps in this argument are presented by Fichte in the chief works of his earlier period (1794-98). The works of that period form a kind of trilogy of philosophy, by which the faint outlines of the absolute selfhood is shown acquiring definite consistency in the moral organisation of society. First comes the “Foundation for the collective philosophy.” It shows how our conception of reality and our psychical organisation are inevitably presupposed in the barest function of intelligence, in the abstractest forms of logical law. Begin where you like, with the most abstract and formal point of consciousness, you are forced, as you dwell upon it (you identifying yourself with the thought you realise), to go step by step on till you accept as a self-consistent and self-explanatory unity all that your cognitive and [pg cxiii] volitional nature claims to own as its birthright. Only in such an intelligent will is perception and sensation possible. Next came the “Foundation of Natural Law, on the principles of the general theory.” Here the process of deduction is carried a step further. If man is to realise himself as an intelligence with an inherent bent to action, then he must be conceived as a person among persons, as possessed of rights, as incapable of acting without at the same moment claiming for his acts recognition, generality, and logical consecution. The reference, which in the conception of a practical intelligence was implicit,—the reference to fellow-agents, to a world in which law rules—is thus, by the explicit recognition of these references, made a fact patent and positive—gesetzt,—expressly instituted in the way that the nature and condition of things postulates. But this is not all: we step from the formal and absolute into the material and relative. If man is to be a real intelligence, he must be an intelligence served by organs. “The rational being cannot realise its efficient individuality, unless it ascribes to itself a material body”: a body, moreover, in which Fichte believes he can show that the details of structure and organs are equally with the general corporeity predetermined by reason51. In the same way it is shown that the social and political organisation is required for the realisation—the making positive and yet coherent—of the rights of all individuals. You deduce society by showing it is required to make a genuine individual man. Thirdly came the “System of Ethics.” Here it is further argued that, at least in a certain respect52, in spite of my absolute reason and my absolute freedom, I can only be fully real as a part of Nature: [pg cxiv] that my reason is realised in a creature of appetite and impulse. From first to last this deduction is one process which may be said to have for its object to determine “the conditions of self-hood or egoity.” It is the deduction of the concrete and empirical moral agent—the actual ego of actual life—from the abstract, unconditioned ego, which in order to be actual must condescend to be at once determining and determined.
In all of this Fichte makes—especially formally—a decided advance upon Kant. In Ethics Kant in particular, (—especially for readers who never got beyond the beginning of his moral treatise and were overpowered by the categorical imperative of duty) had found the moral initiative or dynamic apparently in the other world. The voice of duty seemed to speak from a region outside and beyond the individual conscience. In a sense it must do so: but it comes from a consciousness which is, and yet is more than, the individual. It is indeed true that appearances here are deceptive: and that the idea of autonomy, the self-legislation of reason, is trying to become the central conception of Kant's Ethics. Still it is Fichte's merit to have seen this clearly, to have held it in view unfalteringly, and to have carried it out in undeviating system or deduction. Man, intelligent, social, ethical, is a being all of one piece and to be explained entirely immanently, or from himself. Law and ethics are no accident either to sense or to intelligence—nothing imposed by mere external or supernal authority53. Society is not a brand-new order of things supervening upon and superseding a state of nature, where the individual was entirely self-supporting. Morals, law, society, are all necessary steps (necessary i.e. in logic, and hence in the long run [pg cxv] also inevitable in course of time) to complete the full evolution or realisation of a human being. The same conditions as make man intelligent make him social and moral. He does not proceed so far as to become intelligent and practical, under terms of natural and logical development, then to fall into the hands of a foreign influence, an accident ab extra, which causes him to become social and moral. Rather he is intelligent, because he is a social agent.
Hence, in Fichte, the absence of the ascetic element so often stamping its character on ethics, and representing the moral life as the enemy of the natural, or as mainly a struggle to subdue the sensibility and the flesh. With Kant,—as becomes his position of mere inquirer—the sensibility has the place of a predominant and permanent foreground. Reason, to his way of talking, is always something of an intruder, a stranger from a far-off world, to be feared even when obeyed: sublime, rather than beautiful. From the land of sense which we habitually occupy, the land of reason is a country we can only behold from afar: or if we can be said to have a standpoint in it, that is only a figurative way of saying that though it is really over the border, we can act—it would sometimes seem by a sort of make-believe—as if we were already there. But these moments of high enthusiasm are rare; and Kant commends sobriety and warns against high-minded Schwärmerei, or over-strained Mysticism. For us it is reserved to struggle with a recalcitrant selfhood, a grovelling sensibility: it were only fantastic extravagance, fit for “fair souls” who unfortunately often lapse into “fair sinners,” should we fancy ourselves already anchored in the haven of untempted rest and peace.
When we come to Fichte, we find another spirit [pg cxvi] breathing. We have passed from the age of Frederick the Great to the age of the French Revolution; and the breeze that burst in the War of Liberation is already beginning to freshen the air. Boldly he pronounces the primacy of that faith of reason whereby not merely the just but all shall live. Your will shall show you what you really are. You are essentially a rational will, or a will-reason. Your sensuous nature, of impulse and appetite, far from being the given and found obstacle to the realisation of reason,—which Kant strictly interpreted might sometimes seem to imply—(and in this point Schopenhauer carries out the implications of Kant)—is really the condition or mode of being which reason assumes, or rises up to, in order to be a practical or moral being. Far from the body and the sensible needs being a stumbling-block to hamper the free fullness of rationality and morality, the truth rather is that it is only by body and sense, by flesh and blood, that the full moral and rational life can be realised54. Or, to put it otherwise, if human reason (intelligence and will) is to be more than a mere and empty inner possibility, if man is to be a real and concrete cognitive and volitional being, he must be a member of an ethical and actual society, which lives by bread, and which marries and has children.