less, too full of explanation and of illustrations; the work as a whole is profound and inspiring. Let us hear yet a word of Fichte’s own from this book, in a fine passage where he appeals direct to this infinite itself. “Supreme and living will,” he says, “whom no name names, to thee may I lift up my soul, for thou and I are not parted. Thy voice sounds in me, and mine again in thee; and all my thoughts, if only they be true, are thought in thee. I comprehend thee not, yet in thee I comprehend myself and the world. . . . Best fitted to know thee is childlike and submissive simplicity. ... I know not what thou art for thyself, . . . and after thousand lives lived through, my spirit will comprehend thee as little as now, in this house of clay. For what I have once won to my comprehension becomes even thereby finite. . . . Nay, I wish not to know of thee what thou art in thyself. I know thy bearings on my life. . . . Thou producest.in me the knowledge of my duty. . . . Thou knowest what I think and will; . . . thou choosest that my free obedience shall be effective to all eternity; . . . thou doest, for thy will is itself Deed. Thou livest and art, for thou dost know, will, and do, and art ever present to my insight; but what thou art I shall never wholly know through all the eternities.”
This, you see, is Fichte’s theism. The essence of it is, with all the analogies between the two, something very different from Kant’s postulating of a God beyond the world of sense. The fact is that, for Fichte, my own vocation is the central fact of consciousness. But what my vocation is, is a matter for deeper consideration. And, if I duly consider my vocation, I find that there is a measureless strength of restless will about me, which demands an infinity of time in which to work out my vocation, and an infinite business to meet, with its magnitude, the endlessly significant office that I choose for myself. Plainly, then, I, the true self, am not the mere self
