the dread bondage of the outer world. What Fichte conceived himself to have learned from Kant was therefore this: The rational subject builds its own world, and the dead external world is naught. What Fichte added to Kant, as he went on, was however somewhat elaborate, and constitutes, along with the strictly Kantian elements, his own system, which is almost universally but rather inaptly named “Subjective idealism.”
Let me state it, too, first in rough outline, then a little more systematically. As everybody knows, Fichte accepted Kant’s result in so far as Kant said that space and time are facts only for our consciousness, and that we can’t know any things in themselves beyond us. Only Fichte went further. He denied that there can exist any things in themselves beyond consciousness at all. The world that we spiritual beings know, however bard and fast it may seem, however helplessly we ourselves may individually be subjected to its facts, is still, in the last analysis, there only in so far as we recognize it as there for us. The world, then, is the world that the self makes. So Fichte’s chief principles are these: (1) All philosophy has its source in one primal truth, namely, the truth that living and voluntary selves freely choose to assert themselves, and so to build up their whole organized world; (2) The moral law is, in consequence of this, really prior to all other knowledge, and conditions all that we theoretically know. For as you see, knowing a world is for Fichte making a world, consciously recognizing the truth, acting then in this way or in that. But the law of action, the moral law, thus becomes for Fichte the basis of all theoretical knowing; (3) The apparently fatal outer world about us is simply, in Fichte’s bold and stirringly fantastic words, “the stuff, the material (the opportunity), for our duty, made manifest to our senses (‘das versinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht’).” Beyond all this, however, in the fourth place, Fichte went later, when he
