I.
The Doctrine of Knowledge, apart from all special and definite knowing, proceeds immediately upon Knowledge itself, in the essential unity in which it recognises Knowledge as existing; and it raises this question in the first place:—How this Knowledge can come into being, and what it is in its inward and essential Nature?
The following must be apparent:—There is but One who is absolutely by and through himself,—namely, God; and God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life. He can neither change nor determine himself in aught within himself, nor become any other Being; for his Being contains within it all his Being and all possible Being, and neither within him nor out of him can any new Being arise.
If, therefore, Knowledge must be, and yet be not God himself, then, since there is nothing but God, it can only be God out of himself,—God’s Being out of his Being,—his Manifestation, in which he dwells wholly as he is in himself, while within himself he also still remains wholly such as he is. But such a Manifestation is a picture or Schema.[1]
- ↑ The word Schema here employed by Fichte as representing the Manifestation of the Infinite, and which is left untranslated, may be regarded by the general reader as the equivalent of the ‘Logos’ of Plato, the ‘Word’ of the Fourth Gospel, the ‘Divine Idea’ of The Nature of the Scholar (vol. i.), and the ‘Ex-istence (Daseyn) of God’ of The Doctrine of Religion (vol. ii.)
