self; I must come to possess it; I must prove that it is mine. In the process of thus asserting a foreign world, and then actively identifying it as not foreign and external, but as our own, our life itself consists. This is what is meant by work, by love, by duty.
But this process, thinks Fichte, is essentially an endless one. The more of a self I am, the more of a world outside me I need, to develop and to express my energies. A busy man needs, and therefore posits, a world full of the objects of his business. Without this asserted world of objects, he, as busy man, would cease to exist; he would, so to speak, retire from business; he and his busy world would stagnate together. This, then, is Fichte’s central thought: Your outer world, your not-self, is just as large as your own spiritual activity makes it. Fichte tries to show in detail how the various forms of our recognition of outer reality, such as perception, imagination, space, time, causality, and the rest, arise. Into such details I have no time to follow him; but the essence of his doctrine consists in identifying Kant’s theoretical and practical reason, and in saying that all our assertion of a world beyond, of a world of things and of people, merely expresses, in practical form, our assertion of our own wealthy and varied determination to be busy with things and with people. Thus, then, each of us builds his own world. He builds it in part unconsciously; and therefore he seems to his ordinary thought not to have built it at all, but merely to find it. Each of us sees, at any moment, not only the world that we are now making by this act, but the world that we have made by all our past acts. And hence our whole life is thus consolidated before our eyes; our world is the world of our conscious and unconscious deeds. Thus we often regard it as our fate, and talk of an external substance, as Spinoza did. In this we are wrong. No activity, no world; no self, no not-self; no self-assertion, no facts to assert ourselves upon. So, at least, Fichte teaches.
