OF THE GOOD. 



163 



several problems as it was with Kant, in language 

 free from possible misconstruction. He always spoke 

 of the I, the Ego or the Self, meaning not only 

 as Kant had meant, the individual mind as revealed to 

 every one of us by introspection, but the universal Ego 

 or Self, the universal mind which underlay and created 

 the difference of subject and object, as well as the 

 multiplicity of many individual minds. 1 It was there- 

 fore not before Hegel had dropped the terminology of 

 Fichte and boldly placed the universal or absolute mind 

 at the beginning of his speculation, that the real drift of 

 much that Fichte had said before him became generally 

 intelligible as a leading principle in philosophy, as a 



1 Fichte specially refers to the 

 Bcwussteyn iiberhaupt. I suppose 

 this is something similar to what in 

 modern English philosophy would 

 be called the " concrete universal " 

 of consciousness as such. "The 

 presupposition is that it [the con- 

 ception of our activity] is implied 

 in consciousness as such and is 

 necessarily posited with it. We 

 therefore start with the form 

 of consciousness as such, and 

 make deductions from it, and 

 our investigation is finished if in 

 the course of our deductions 

 we come back again to the con- 

 ception of a sensuous activity" 

 (ibid., p. 4). It may incidentally be 

 remarked that if Fichte had taken 

 the psychological view and not, as 

 Kant already objected, the purely 

 logical, he might have brought out 

 more clearly what is implied in the 

 whole of his argumentation. In- 

 deed, we may see in the latter 

 foreshadowed what in the course of 

 the nineteenth century has been 

 more clearly brought out by such 

 thinkers as Reuouvier (see supra, 

 vol. iii. p. 206. n.) and by Jas. Ward 



in his doctrine of the (sensory and 

 motor) presentation-continuum (see 

 supra, vol. iii. p. 280, n., 291). In 

 fact, Fichte would have urged, 

 more emphatically than he did, 

 the fundamental synopsis in the 

 development of the phenomena of 

 consciousness. As it is, he, in many 

 passages, insists upon Anschau- 

 ung, i.e., 'seeing,' 'sight,' or 

 ' feeling,' as the fundamental fact 

 of consciousness. This term has 

 been unfortunately translated by 

 ' intuition,' which suggests more 

 than an immediate "awareness" 

 (see supra, vol. iii. p. 612, n.). 

 There is also no doubt that Fichte 

 felt increasingly the necessity of a 

 deeper psychological justification of 

 his whole system, as is clearly seen 

 from the latest work which he 

 prepared for publication, the ' That- 

 sachen des Bewusstseyns.' The 

 late Prof. Adamson in his ' Intro- 

 duction ' to Fichte's Philosophy 

 (' Fichte,' Blackwood's Philosophi- 

 cal Classics,1881 ) remarks that much 

 of Fichte's penetrating analysis re- 

 minds one of similar work among 

 British psychologists. 



