OF KNOWLEDGE. 



365 



maintained that the certainties which this higher sense 

 reveals to those who cultivate it depend just as much 

 upon immediate evidence, upon intuition and insight, 

 as all the truth of external reality depends ultimately 

 upon the evidence of our external senses. By this 

 doctrine of the immediate certainty afforded by the 

 perceptions of our lower and higher senses, he repeated 

 the truth which has been many times urged by the 

 greatest thinkers, and many times forgotten by those 



brought out with much power in 

 the last rendering of his ' Wissen- 

 schaftslehre,' which is contained in 

 the last course of lectures which 

 he delivered at the University 

 of Berlin in the year 1813, pub- 

 lished posthumously by his son, 

 J. H. Fichte, in the year 1834. 

 The immediate source of all 

 higher speculation is asserted 

 there very distinctly : the fact 

 that all knowledge is based upon 

 immediate conviction afforded by 

 some lower or higher (physical or 

 spiritual) sense. Starting with the 

 declaration that neither Kant nor 

 he himself had been correctly 

 understood, he proceeds to state 

 what he, in the beginning of his 

 career, had represented as the 

 cardinal point of his doctrine ; 

 what had not been quite clear to 

 Kant ; and what, after a lengthy 

 acquaintance with this attitude of 

 thought, had become clear to him- 

 self, viz., that "this doctrine pre- 

 supposes an entirely new inner 

 sense-organ through which a new 

 world is opened out which does 

 not exist for the ordinary human 

 mind. This is not to be under- 

 stood as an exaggeration or a 

 rhetorical phrase thrown out only 

 to claim so much more — with the 

 secret reserve that so much less 

 would be given, — but it is to be 



understood literally as follows : for 

 human beings as they are through 

 birth and ordinary education this 

 doctrine is distinctly unintellig- 

 ible ; the things of which it treats 

 don't exist for them, because they 

 have not got the sense through and 

 for which these things exist. . . . 

 They cannot understand it, they 

 must misunderstand it. The first 

 condition, therefore, is that the 

 sense be created in them for which 

 these things exist" (Fichte's 

 ' Nachgelassene Werke,' vol. i. p. 

 4). He then goes on to explain 

 by analogy with the physical 

 senses the nature of this higher 

 sense. It aims at a reformation 

 of the whole man, a renewing and 

 expansion of his whole existence 

 out of a contracted into a wider 

 circumference. He further ex- 

 plains that this sense exists poten- 

 tially, but must be drawn out or 

 developed. That such a sense ex- 

 ists is not a new doctrine : it has 

 been used ever "since human be- 

 ings existed, and what is great 

 and excellent in the world and 

 through which alone humanity is 

 preserved comes from the visions 

 of that sense. That such a sense 

 exists is not new, but it has only 

 been clearly seen in recent times," 

 &c., &c. (ibid., p. 7). 



