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may be good for the race that is bad for the individuals who take it (e.g. from Paradise into Freedom).1

3. Nature wills that the individual shall choose and make his own happiness, and no one else can do so for him. Nature, in short, provides for the race, and the individual provides for himself. We must not forget that Kant considers the individual bound as a moral being to consider and to promote the happiness of others.2

4. Antagonism is Nature's chief means of developing human capacities. Man has social tendencies because in society he feels that his powers are developed; but he has also tendencies to solitary life and isolation from others and rest and quietness. "Man wills harmony ; and Nature for the sake of the race wills discord. Nevertheless Nature herself wills an ultimate harmony (cf. IV. 321), and so

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5. The greatest problem of the race is to found such a civil society as will realize law everywhere.

6. This problem will be the last to be solved, “so crooked is the wood out of which we are carved."

7. Its solution depends on the possibility of an orderly relation of States to one another, a fœdus Amphictyопит. All wars may be regarded as experiments in that direction.

8. That is the end to which Nature is working in human history;-it is the state of things in which all human powers will be developed. "A man's chief con

cern should be to fill his place in creation fitly, and learn to be really a man.”3

Thus the ways of providence are vindicated. At present, no doubt, though civilized, we are not yet made moral. The Enlightenment spoken of by the French philosophers is simply our coming of age, when we claim to think and act for ourselves. This is a rational claim; but it is only a condition not the chief end of progress.

Kant, like Herder, regards development or evolution

1 Probable Beginning of Human History, IV. 321. So Hegel locked on the Fall as the "eternal mythus of man"; man passes from innocence to sin and then to conscious morality.-E.g. Works, VI. 54, XII. 265. 2e.g. Tugendlehre, VII. 205, 256 seq.

+ IV. (Aufklärung), 161.

3 VIII. 623. 5 The word "evolution" occurs e.g. IV. 188. Cf. Kr. d. Urtheils

as "organic." Between organized bodies and the State there is an analogy; every member of the body politic is to be at once means and end, at once helping to hold up the State, and itself dependent on the whole for its own support. But (he says) this idea of organic evolution goes beyond physical science; it is a metaphysical notion implying the unity of all organic forces in the world. This is a wide conception which science would rightly regard as inadmissible from its point of view.2 Teleology is excluded by science from its interpretations of facts; it is not "constitutive," though it is always present as an impulse and guide to the provisional inquiries; in other words, it is "regulative.' Physical science is bound to explain by mechanical principles and experience. Experience tells us how things are and have been, but does not tell us that they cannot be otherwise in the future.*

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Rousseau had no such optimistic view of history. Kant, for whom Rousseau's writing had a magical attraction, differs from that author in his very startingpoint; "Rousseau proceeds synthetically and begins with the natural man; I proceed analytically, and begin with the civilized man. Kant considers that in civilization what is too often lost in simplicity is gained in opportunities of progress. The idea of the organic development of human powers was the form which the eighteenth century's conception of progress, such as we have seen it in Godwin, took in the case of Kant. He worked out no more than the bare outlines of a philosophy of history; but he and Herder had done enough to plant the idea in German philosophy. This service of theirs which seems remote from economics was in reality to be of great importance to that study.

kraft, § 81, V. 436. In its modern sense it was as old as Leibnitz. See Prof. R. Eucken's Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart. Second Edition, 1892, p. 104.

2 Urtheilskraft, V. 387, Urtheilskraft, V. 391.

2 IV. 161.

4 IV. 182.

5 VIII. 618. The relation of Kant to Rousseau is considered in Dietrich's Kant und Rousseau (1878) and Fester's Rousseau und die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie (1890), ch. iii.

CHAPTER II.

J. G. FICHTE (1762-1814).

ECONOMISTS of the school of Adam Smith have been often blamed for putting wealth instead of man in the forefront of their inquiries. Fichte goes farther than most of these critics. In his essay on the Dignity of Man (1794) he puts the Ego in the centre of all philosophy, and explains that by the Ego he means the Man.' It is the conception of a self-conscious spirit, or Man, that first shows. to us that the world is a cosmos, and (he considers) the remark is true not only speculatively but practically and physically. "Man makes raw materials organize themselves after his ideal; he tames the wild animals and domesticates the wild plants." Science, first awakened by hard necessity, gradually knows and subdues Nature (Destiny of Man, 1800). Men in company with men become more truly human, and human society reveals and developes the true nature of humanity. Though all outward embodiments of his ideal decay, the ideal itself remains, ever tending to transform the material world to its own likeness, and it remains an elevating feature in the lowest. forms of humanity; the down-trodden slave on American plantation is a temple of the Holy Ghost.3

Nothing could be more spiritual and less egoistic (in the vulgar sense of the term) than the teaching of Fichte with whom the modern socialism of Germany may be said to begin. "All progress," he says, "is due to unselfish devotion to ideas" (VII. 41). The State is no mere economic association (VII. 144, 157). Yet no

modern socialist is more deeply dissatisfied with the condition of the labouring classes. "The majority of mankind are all their life long bowed down by hard toil to

1 Works, I. 412, 413.

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provide food for themselves and for the minority who do their thinking for them; immortal spirits are forced to tie down all their thoughts and schemes and efforts to the earth that feeds them" (Destiny of Man, Wks., II. 266, 267). But the destiny of our race is "to be united into one body completely in accord with itself and uniformly developed " (ib., 271). History shows a progress in this direction. Greek culture was good; but modern extends over far larger numbers of men, and the extension must go on till not merely as now a few nations but all nations of the earth share the benefits of it. This end reached, there is a further end: "When all useful things over the world have been discovered and distributed, then without stay or relapse, with united forces marching well in step, men will steadily rise to a culture of which we can at present form no conception" (ib., 272, 273). In 1800, when these words were written, the idea of the Perfectibility of Man had not lost its fascination, and it is one of Fichte's points of contact with the Revolutionary writers. Another is his view of contemporary political institutions. Existing States are no true States but "strange combinations formed by senseless accident." He does not, like Godwin, consider the State to be in itself a mere necessary evil, and his idea of the course of its development is not like that of Godwin. Godwin foresaw a gradual and peaceful evolution of Society; Fichte thinks that the change will come through an attempt of the upper classes to tighten their grasp on the lower, resulting in a desperate effort of the latter to secure freedom, abolish privilege, and introduce equality (Dest. of M., 273). Then will arise a true State in which every man will be secured against violence, and there will be a reign of true peace. Foreign wars will cease, for there will be no motive for wrong-doing. Men are not wicked for the sake of wickedness (cf. 314), but because as things are they get gain by it. When they have all their wants supplied, not at the expense of others, but with mutual advantage to their neighbours and themselves, vice itself will cease and emulation will take no hurtful forms (276, 277). But this happy state of affairs is only a finite and earthly perfection (279). It is only a mechanism or means to an end (281), the human race cannot be redeemed by a mere

mechanism; and the goal itself towards which the union of spirits, of free human wills is striving, is a moral perfection, not a heaven beyond the grave, but a heaven here in this world. The kingdom of heaven is within us (283, cf. 289). Perfect external conditions are only desirable as a means to this higher spiritual perfection (285) which is no doubt never reachable by any individual, but is postulated by the moral law, and involves therefore an infinite progress to it-an endless life for the human spirit (287). Without the law of duty there would not even be a present world: with it, there is also another world (288). In other words, the consciousness of a spiritual bond, of union with other men, is what constitutes our world; it is as real a fact as any in our experience, but it is not attested by the senses; it is spiritual, and its possibilities are all the greater (cf. 301, etc.).

We need not follow Fichte into his further metaphysical conclusions on this head, drawn out as they are with an eloquence that helps us to understand Fichte's influence among his contemporaries. The general metaphysical principles of Fichte are important to us only in so far as they guided Hegel to his Dialectic. In his Doctrine of Knowledge (if we may so translate Wissenschaftslehre, (1794) Fichte carries out (as he thinks) the Kantian Criticism consistently to its furthest consequences. There remains no thing-in-itself; but all begins and ends in Ego. What corresponds, however, to a thing-in-itself is the element of distinction or opposition involved in an act of Knowledge, and bringing with it a perpetual effort to overcome it and to abolish the very existence of a non-Ego. In his practical life where man is active (as distinguished from his theoretical, where he is in a sense receptive and passive), this effort to conquer the non-Ego means the endeavour to bring the world into harmony with the spirit of man; and his progress, whether in knowledge or in moral action, has three stages-thesis (assertion of the Ego), antithesis (contrasted assertion of a non-Ego), and synthesis, or a harmonizing of the two. This law of three stages seems

1 This was Kant's view, Fractical Reason (1788), Works, V. 128. 2 (Cf. Spencer, Man v. the State, page 6). It may be added that one evidence of the reality is the effect produced by the loss of friends, in altering our whole world.

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