76 GERMAN PHILObOPHV. 



chase for that day, he chose not to be "at home. " I have not attempt- 

 ed to visit a prince since. 



GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 



By C. Dc Remusat, Member of the Institute of France, 



(Continued from p. 25.) 



FICHTE. 



How does this principle, which with Kant was Ijnt the beginning of 

 the transcendental criticism, how does it become the universal principle 

 of all science, of all ontology ? The me as determining and limiting 

 itself is active ; as limited it is passive ; active as self-determining, pas- 

 sive as determined. / think expresses a passive state, as it is a deter- 

 mined state which excludes every other mode of being ; but in itself it 

 is an activity ; the thinker is active, the thought passive, — grammar it- 

 self tells us. The effort of Fichte to reduce everything to the activity 

 of the ?«e, to reduce the duality of subject and object to the intellectual 

 duality of the subject taking itself as an object, a duality which is only 

 a form of unity, — this effort I say has been baffled. 



We may indeed admit with him that the 7ne in itself, prior to all de- 

 terminate knowledge, prior to all external knowledge which limits it, 

 and which manifests the duality and the opposition of itself and that 

 which is not itself, can be conceived as a pure ??ie, and in that sense, as 

 absolute and infinite, that is to say, as an unlimited power of knowing, 

 a potential thought, an activity or power of acting that, embracing in it- 

 self the possibility and the laws of its own action, is thus a free activ- 

 hy. But it is equally true that, inasmuch as that activity enters into ac- 

 tion, and, as it passes from a potentiality into an act, it must necessarily 

 determine itself, it must know something or other, and also that in the 

 expression " to know something '''' tliere is a subject and a government, in 

 the act which it expresses there is a subject and an object. Thus the 

 me in action passes from unity to duality. It can know without any 

 opposition becoming manifest. Such is the empirical me compared with 

 the pure me. 



But in the empirical me also, there is a unity of the me ; for the me 

 cannot know that wiiich is not or does not appear to be itself but by 

 appropriating it to itself, making itself present in that which is known 

 just as in that which knows; the me in passing from the subject to the 

 object, still goes from itself to itself, it establishes and continues its own 

 proper activity. To know a thing, an object, any not-me whatever, is 

 to perceive what one perccivce, is to be conscious of a sensation. — 



