this so-called deception—which is easily got rid of, and which true philosophy roots out utterly—that false philosophy has itself produced, and as soon as you get your philosophy perfected, the scales will fall from your eyes, and the deception will never recur. You will, in all your life thereafter, never believe to know more than that you are finite, and finite in this determined manner, which you must explain to yourself, by the existence of such a determined world; and you will no more think of breaking through this limit than of ceasing to be yourself. Leibnitz, also, may have been convinced, for, properly understood—and why should he not have properly understood himself?—he is right. Nay, more—if highest ease and freedom of mind may suggest conviction; if the ingenuity to fit one’s philosophy into all forms, and apply it to all parts of human knowledge—the power to scatter all doubts as soon as they appear, and the manner of using one’s philosophy more as an instrument than as an object, may testify of perfect clearness; and if self-reliance, cheerfulness and high courage in life may be signs of inner harmony, then Leibnitz was perhaps convinced, and the only example of conviction in the history of philosophy.
In conclusion, I wish to refer in a few words to a very curious misapprehension. It is that of mistaking the Ego, as intellectual contemplation, from which the Science of Knowledge proceeds, for the Ego, as idea, with which it concludes. In the Ego, as intellectual contemplation, we have only the form of the Egoness, the in itself returning activity, sufficiently described above. The Ego in this form is only for the philosopher, and by seizing it thus, you enter philosophy. The Ego, as idea, on the contrary, is for the Ego itself, which the philosopher considers. He does not establish the latter Ego as his own, but as the idea of the natural but perfectly cultured man; just as a real being does not exist for the philosopher, but merely for the Ego he observes.
The Ego as idea is the rational being—firstly, in so far as it completely represents in itself the universal reason, or as it is altogether rational and only rational, and hence it must also have ceased to be individual, which it was only through sensuous limitation; and secondly, in so far as this rational being has also realized reason in the eternal world, which, therefore, remains constantly posited in this idea. The world remains in this idea as world generally, as substratum with these determined mechanical and organic laws; but all these laws are perfectly suited to represent the final object of reason. The idea of the Ego and the Ego of the intellectual contemplation have only this in common, that in neither of them the thought of the individual enters; not in the latter, because the Egoness has not yet been determined as individuality; and not in the former, because the determination of individuality has vanished through universal culture. But both are opposites in this, that the Ego of the contemplation contains only the form of the Ego, and pays no regard to an actual material of the same, which is only thinkable by its thinking of a world; while in the Ego of the Idea the complete material of the Egoness is thought. From the first conception all philosophy proceeds, and it is its fundamental conception; to the latter it does not return, but only determines this idea in the practical part as highest and ultimate object of reason. The first is, as we have said, original contemplation, and becomes a conception in the sufficiently described manner; the latter is only idea, it cannot be thought determinately and will never be actual, but will always more and more approximate to the actuality.
These are, I believe, all the misunderstandings which are to be taken into consideration, and to correct which a clear explanation may hope somewhat to aid. Other modes of working against the new system cannot and need not be met by me.
If a system, for instance, the beginning and end, nay, the whole essence of which, is that individuality be theoretically forgotten and practically denied, is denounced as egotism, and by men who, for the very
