Finding that he excites considerable surprise by the apprehensions which he expresses lest the "I" should appear to him, he exclaims in great wrath:—
"Oh, I see, I'd take you; quite, quite! You do not think me you one-eighth part as rational as yourselves, but rather mad. Wolf[1]! Here! Here! Thou beast has often in my solitary rambles and wanderings been my shield-bearer and exorcist against the 'I.' Sir, a man that has read Fichte, and his vicar-general and brain-serf Schelling, has often as I have done, by way of fun, will at last find the matter sufficiently serious. The 'I' supposes itself, i.e. the 'I' and that certain remainder which some people call the world. When philosophers deduce anything, in—for instance, an idea, or themselves,—from themselves, and they fail not, if they're proper philosophers at all, to deduce in like manner the remaining universe. The 'I' imagines itself; it is therefore the object and the subject, and, at the same time, the lair of both; by Jove! there is an empirical and a pure 'I;' the last words which according to Sheridan and Oxford, Swift pronounced shortly before his death, were 'I am I," which I call sufficiently philosophical.…
"I can put up with anything except the 'I,' the pure intellectual 'I,' the god of gods. How often have I not, like my name and deed-sake Scioppius or Schoppe, changed my name and have annually become a different man, yet still the pure 'I' is manifestly pursuing me. One sees it most plainly in journeys, when one looks at one's own legs, and sees and hears them stalking along, and puts the question, Who is it that is so vigorously keeping pace with me down there? And then he is eternally talking to me: if you should someday personally appear before me, I should not be the last to grow faint and pale as death."—Titan, s. W., t. xxiv. pp. 114, 115.
This tendency to insanity, engendered by Fichte's philosophy, is brought to a crisis by the prediction of mysterious personage, half-wizard, half-juggler, who finds him an obstruction to his dark and crooked designs, and tells him that within a certain period he will be beside himself. The impression produced on Schoppe's mind by this prophesy, helps, as predictions of such a nature are apt to do, to bring about his own verification; and an accumulation of harassing incidents at the critical period works up his mind to such a degree of excitement that his bodily health gives way under it, and he dies in a paroxysm brought on by the sudden appearance of Siebenkäs whom he mistakes for the long dreaded personal appearance of the 'I.'
"'My Schoppe,' exclaimed the figure (Siebenkäs), 'I am in search of the: does thou not know me?' 'Long enough have I known thee! Thou art old "I"—come on then, and put thy face close to mine,
- ↑ The name of Schoppe's dog.
