364 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



knowledge must be ultimately based upon the im- 

 mediate evidence afforded by the senses, he did not 

 limit the word sense to mean only the external or 

 bodily senses, upon the evidence of which ordinary 

 knowledge is based ; he extended its meaning 

 to denote the existence of a higher sense which, 

 though latent in every human mind, requires, 

 nevertheless, to be nursed and educated so as to 

 furnish the entrance into the region of spirituality 

 and form the beginning of the higher life. 1 And he 



of Herder and others, developed 

 independent theories on historical, 

 sesthetical, and educational sub- 

 jects ; and had latterly, in prose 

 and poetry, given a new turn to 

 Kantian ideas on ethics and the 

 vocation of art in the development 

 of culture and society. Above all, 

 there had appeared in the year 

 1790 the first rendering of Goethe's 

 greatest and immortal work ' Faust,' 

 in which there occur the memor- 

 able words : '' Im Anfang war die 

 That." Kuno Fischer, with an 

 equal knowledge of modern poetry 

 and modern philosophy, was the 

 first, in his ' History of Modern 

 Philosophy' and in his smaller 

 writings, to show the intimate 

 connection which existed between 

 the literary and the philosophical 

 movement at Jena and Weimar at 

 the end of the eighteenth and at 

 the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century. This interconnection, 

 which nevertheless did not de- 

 prive either of the two move- 

 ments of their independent and 

 original character, has been more 

 fully traced by Prof. Windelband 

 and also by recent biographers 

 of Goethe, Herder, and others. 

 Using a modern phrase, we may 

 say that Fichte preached Prag- 

 matism but on a higher level than 



is done in America and England at 

 this moment. 



1 More recent expositions of 

 Fichte's philosophy and the de- 

 velopment of his ideas have 

 brought out clearly that he 

 laboured up to the end of his 

 comparatively short career (he died 

 in 1814 from hospital fever 

 which he, as well as his wife, 

 caught whilst devoting themselves, 

 during the War of Liberation, to 

 the nursing of the sick and 

 wounded) to give more precision 

 to the fundamental conception 

 from which he had started twenty 

 years before. This view, estab- 

 lished notably by Kuno Fischer 

 and Windelband, contradicts to 

 some extent an earlier conception 

 which had its origin mainly in the 

 polemic of Schelling, who tried to 

 show that Fichte, under his in- 

 fluence, had modified the char- 

 acter of his speculation. There 

 seems no doubt that Fichte him- 

 self was aware that his funda- 

 mental idea required clearer ex- 

 position, a more thorough logical 

 and psychological grounding ; but 

 he refused to see that what was 

 lacking in his own treatment had 

 been at all supplied either by 

 Schelling or by Hegel. His in- 

 dependent attitude of thought is 



