l8o INTRODUCTION 



Leibniz, in antagonism to the dualist position of Descartes, 

 does not lay stress on the distinction of subject and object, 

 but conceives the universe as an infinity of subjects, each 

 self-sufficient and 'in the sea of life enisled.' For Kant, 

 the distinction of subject and object is all in all. Fichte 

 still gives full weight to the distinction, but conceives it 

 as overcome in the unity of self-consciousness, or rather 

 as flowing necessarily from that unity in its most abstract 

 and indefinite form, and being lost in that unity in its 

 highest and most perfect form. Thus, according to 

 Leibniz, the whole succession of a Monad's states,' all its 

 perceptions of the universe, proceed spontaneously from 

 within itself, t as if there were only God and itself in the 

 world l ' ; and every created Monad contains within itself 

 both matter and form, which are in reality degrees of 

 one power or function. Similarly, the ego of Fichte, the 

 primal self-consciousness, is a perfectly spontaneous force, 

 producing from within itself the empirical ego and non- 

 ego, subject and object, making its own external world, 

 projecting that world through the power of imagination, 

 and continually striving towards the ultimate overcoming 

 of this distinction between outer and inner in a pure 

 * intellectual intuition.' Accordingly Fichte throws down 

 the barriers which Kant had raised between perception 

 and conception, and returns to the position of Leibniz 

 that all knowledge is one great process of development, 

 though, of course, he gives a very different account of 

 this development from that which we find in Leibniz 2 . 



thing they are fitted for. If anyone tells us that no idea [Vor- 

 stellung] can arise in us from an external action, there is endless 

 astonishment. To be a philosopher one must believe that the 

 Monads have windows, through which things come and go.' 

 (Schelling, Sammtliche Werke, vol. i. do. Ideen zu einer Philosophic der 

 Natur, commended by Fichte, Werke, i. 515 note.) 



1 Lettre a Foucher (1686), (G. i. 382). Cf. New System. 14. 



3 ' The final notion of Fichte' s philosophy, expressed more clearly 

 in the later works than in the Wissenschaftslehre, is that of the 

 divine or spiritual order of which finite spirits are the manifestation 

 or realization, and in the light of which human life and its 

 surroundings appear as the continuous progress in ever higher 

 stages towards realization of the final end of reason. Under this 



