LECTURE V
FICHTE
Now that we have reached and passed for the first time in our study the thinker upon whom, more than upon any other centre, modern thought turns, as upon a fulcrum, I am tempted to pause, at the beginning of this lecture, until I have suggested still more of what Kant means to modern thought. It is not, I suppose, merely historical sketches of the philosophers that you desire from me. You want to get from these philosophers such help as this brief study can suggest towards a comprehension of the spiritual problems of our own day. So, after suggesting at the last lecture what manner of man the historical Kant was, and what was the essence of his doctrine, I shall now try to draw afresh the moral from this part of our story.
I.
The movement from Spinoza to Kant has taught us a lesson which human thought everywhere has to learn, namely, that deeper truth is too valuable to be won by any short and easy process, and that spiritual history has everywhere a decidedly tragic element. We begin with our world simply, in a cliildlike faith that nature and God are ours by right of our birth. Our first lesson is that they are both of them at all events far deeper realities than we had supposed. Nature for Spinoza, as for all other great thinkers, isn’t the nature that you see with your eyes. It is the nature that you think with your reason; and to think it with your reason you have to go behind sense to the law, to the substance of things. Even
