But, you will say, is not the outcome of all this a sort of solitary self-existence, where each one of us is shut up to his own life? Has the spiritual world no absolute reality? Is it, too, the mere dream of our activity? No, thinks Fichte, not so; and here comes a part of his doctrine that was to himself the hardest part. He never made it perfectly clear, although he tried again and again. To you I can only suggest it. When we reflect upon our inner activity we find it, after all, not an individual self-will, but a deep longing for universal life. The true self, therefore (and so far the thing is indeed clear enough), the true self isn’t the private person, the individual called Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the impecunious tutor, the wavering lover of Johanna Rahn, the professor in Jena, falsely accused of atheism. This true self, thinks Fichte, is something infinite. It needs a whole endless world of life to express itself in. Its moral law couldn’t be expressed in full on any one planet. Johann Gottlieb may be one of its prophets; but the heavens could not contain its glory and its eternal business. No one of us ever finally gets at the true Reason which is the whole of him. Each one of us is a partial embodiment, an instrument of the moral law, and our very consciousness tells us that this law is the expression of an infinite world life. The true self is the will, which is everywhere present in things. This will is, indeed, the vine, whereof our wills are the branches. Fichte has innumerable ways of trying to tell finally and clearly the story of what the infinite will is and does. It is eternally asserting itself afresh, through countless finite wills. Each one of these finite wills, as moral agent, builds its sense world, and finds, in this sense world, the manifestations of other agents. For all the agents, as ministers of the divine, work together. The moral consciousness says to each, “If I am real, so also are these. Work with them; respect their rights; honor their freedom; join with them to build a higher and freer world
