OF THE UNITY OF THOUGHT. 



627 



In addition to this Fichte also took up the question 

 of the ultimate source of knowledge and certainty 

 of any kind. This he found in immediate evidence, or 

 what he terms " an intellectual intuition." By this 

 he meant that the beginning of all thought is a self- 

 evidence, an intuition, or, as others would say, a Belief. 

 Kant had already made use of this term in his third 

 ' Critique ' ; but it was there suggested rather as con- 

 tradictory to the view developed in his two earlier 



again in the philosophy of the 

 nineteenth century, and in this 

 respect thinkers of very different 

 schools, such as Lotze, Jodl, 

 Eucken, and even Bradley, re- 

 mind us continually of Fichte's 

 philosophical ideals. In the work- 

 ing out of this highest philo- 

 sophical programme, brought home 

 to us again in the Lecture Syl- 

 labus of Prof. Sorley (' Gifford 

 Lectures,' 1914, i. 1), the abstruse 

 and forbidding terminology and 

 analysis of Fichte's esoteric writ- 

 ings has been forgotten. Never- 

 theless it is impossible to read the 

 exposition of such thinkers as the 

 late Prof. Robert Adamson in this 

 country, and still more of Prof. 

 Windelband in Germany, and not 

 to recognise that modern psychology 

 is approaching the same problem in 

 a less ambitious but possibly more 

 promising manner. For a clear 

 understanding I would recommend 

 those who are deterred by Fichte's 

 own expositions, which seem never 

 to have given him full satisfaction, 

 to read the chapter on Fichte in 

 Adamson's ' Lectures on Modern 

 Philosophy' (ed. by W. R. Sor- 

 ley, 1903, vol. i. pp. 253 - 263), 

 and the luminous chapters in 

 Windelband's ' Die Bliitezeit der 

 Deutschen Philosophic ' (2nd vol. 

 of the ' History of Modern Philo- 

 sophy,' 4th ed. 1907, 63 and 67). 



Windelband says : " From the 

 fundamental principle of Fichte's 

 doctrine there follows a result 

 which places it, with all its dialec- 

 tic consequences, in irreconcilable 

 contrast with the common-sense 

 view of things. It is better to 

 mark this contrast quite clearly 

 than to hide it : it contains the 

 ultimate reason for all that has 

 appeared and still appears para- 

 doxical in the idealistic philosophy. 

 The naive consciousness can think 

 of a function (process) only as the 

 state or the activity of a function- 

 ing being. In whatever way this 

 relation is represented, the ordinary 

 way of reasoning thinks, first of 

 things, and then of functions which 

 they carry out. Fichte's doctrine 

 turns this relation upside down : 

 what we term ' things ' it looks 

 upon as products of activities. If 

 we look upon activities as some- 

 thing which presupposes Being, for 

 Fichte all Being is merely a pro- 

 duct of an original doing. Func- 

 tion without a functioning some- 

 thing is for him the ultimate 

 metaphysical principle." A direc- 

 tion of thought similar to this 

 recurs again and again in modern 

 philosophy e.g., in Wundt's criti- 

 cal destruction of the conception of 

 substance, in the Energetics of 

 Ostwald and others, in M. Berg- 

 son's conception of motion, &c. 



