358 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



of his task. But he also very soon became convinced 

 that the Kantian scheme would require considerable 

 modification in order to meet what he considered to be 

 the demands of the age. What attracted Fichte most 

 in Kant's philosophy was that Kant assigned to the 

 practical reason or the moral principle in human nature 

 the supremacy over the purely intellectual side. In 

 this moral region were not only to be found the answers 

 to the great fundamental questions, which the purely 

 logical analysis was unable to give, but it also appeared 

 that the " categorical imperative " or moral law was the 

 greater, the only, reality with which man was able to 

 confront the otherwise overwhelming and crushing 

 reality of the external world. What in Kant's philo- 

 sophy came at the end of a long and wearisome logical 

 and dialectical process seemed to Fichte to be worthy 

 of being elevated to the position of the initial and 

 dominating principle of all speculation. This was the 

 fact that the human mind was primarily not reflective 

 and passive, but active and assertive. Action, self- 

 assertion, comes before reflection ; a primary synthesis 

 precedes the subsequent reflective analysis. The many 

 opposites and dualities which played such an important 

 part in the ' Critique of Pure Reason,' such as sense and 

 intellect, understanding and reason, form and content, 

 cause and effect, appearance and reality, the phenomenon 

 and the noumenon (or the thing in itself), freedom and 

 necessity, all these appeared to Fichte to be mere 

 abstractions which were made out of the original unity 

 by the activity of the intellect or pure reason, apart from 

 which they could not be understood. This unity itself 



