as I am effectively righteous, I see the same stuff that my fellow-workers see. Matter is thus the mere condition of our common tasks. Each one of us creates it for himself. We create together and in agreement, in so far as we want to toil for a common purpose. And the rationality of the divine plan secures to us a power thus to create and to work together. Meanwhile, good and bad men, noble and base men, strong and weak men, really do not see precisely the same sense world. The seeming outer world for any man actually varies with his moral perceptions. The sense world is saner and more orderly for the cultivated man than for the savage, for the good man than for the man absorbed in the pleasure of the moment, for the wise man than for the fool. And thus the doctrine conforms, thinks Fichte, to the actual facts. “The necessity,” says the philosopher, “with which the belief in the reality of phenomena forces itself upon us is a moral necessity, the only one that is possible for a moral being; herein our duty reveals itself.” And thus we have, in the barest outline, the famous “subjective idealism” of Fichte. One might better call it “ethical idealism” in its extremest expression. So much, then, for my first rough summary. And now what shall we say of this sort of idealism?
A bold, yes, an extravagant doctrine! you will say. Kant’s things in themselves have gone out of this world of Fichte. Yet somehow we at first scarcely miss them. Kant, to be sure, felt quite out of place in Fichte’s fantastic universe, and publicly expressed his repentance, ere he died, that he had ever encouraged this young disciple so freely. “Save me from my friends,” cried Kant, very sincerely, in a printed note of explanation. The transformation lay of course in Fichte’s determination not merely to do away with Kant’s things in themselves, but to see at once into the very heart of the moral order, whose supremacy Kant had only postulated. If you now ask
