sphere. Not immediately from thee to me, nor from me to thee, flows forth the knowledge which we have of each other;—we are separated by an insurmountable barrier. Only through the common fountain of our spiritual being do we know of each other; only in Him do we recognise each other, and influence each other. “Here reverence the image of freedom upon the earth;—here, a work which bears its impress:”—thus is it proclaimed within me by the voice of that Will, which speaks to me only in so far as it imposes duties upon me;—and the only principle through which I recognise thee and thy work, is the command of conscience to respect them.
Whence, then, our feelings, our sensible intuitions, our discursive laws of thought, on all which is founded the external world which we behold, in which we believe that we exert an influence on each other? With respect to the two last—our sensible intuitions and our laws of thought—to say, these are laws of reason in itself, is only to give no satisfactory answer at all. For us, indeed, who are excluded from the pure domain of reason in itself, it may be impossible to think otherwise, or to conceive of reason under any other law. But the true law of reason in itself is the practical law, the law of the super-sensual world, or of that sublime Will. And, leaving this for a moment undecided, whence comes our universal agreement as to feelings, which, nevertheless, are something positive, immediate, inexplicable? On this agreement in feeling, perception, and in the laws of thought, however, it depends that we all behold the same external world.
“It is a harmonious, although inconceivable, limitation of the finite rational beings who compose our
