developed more clearly a doctrine obviously latent and implied in his earlier works, namely, the doctrine that the universe of the self-asserting and world-creating selves, each of whom sees about him in daily life simply the very stuff and fibre of his moral law made manifest to his senses as an opportunity for his moral work, — that this universe of selves, I say, constitutes the life and embodiment of the one true and infinite Reason, God’s will, which, itself supreme and far above the level of our finite personality, uses even our conscious lives and wills as part of its own life. This doctrine Fichte himself, in one of his later works (“The Way to the Blessed Life”), identifies with the teaching of the fourth Gospel. According to this view, you see, God, in so far as he reveals himself, is indeed the vine, and we, in so far as we truly live, are the sap-laden and fruitful branches. The only real world is the world of conscious activity, and so of spiritual relationships, of society, of serious business, of friendship, of love, of law, of national existence, — in a word, of work; as for matter, that is the mere show stuff that is needed to embody, to express, to give form, stability, outline, as it were, to our moral work.
I may put Fichte’s theory of the external world in yet another fashion, thus: In company with another spirit, so Fichte thinks, I can only work in case he and I have a sense world in common. Hence our common devotion, our social enthusiasm, our duty, requires of us all that we try to embody our ideals in the same sense forms. If we succeed, we all see the same houses and streets, the same people moving, the same flags waving. Seeing thus in common, we can work in common. If we did not find out how to work in common, we should express the vagueness of our immoral isolation in the separateness of our various sense worlds; in other words, we should dream or be delirious. I dream when I am not at work. When I am strenuously active I am awake; and therefore, in so far
