the conception of a phenomenal order absolutely ruled by the causal
law. But there is another source of knowledge: in an act of inner
vision or intellectual intuition, which is itself an act of freedom,
we become conscious of the universal moral purpose; the law of duty or
the categorical imperative commands us to be free persons. We cannot
refuse to accept this law without abandoning ourselves as persons,
without conceiving ourselves as _things_, or mere products of nature;
the choice of one's philosophy, therefore, depends upon what kind of
man one is--upon one's values, upon one's will. The type of man who
is a slave of things, who cannot raise himself out of the causal
mechanism, who is not free, will never be able to conceive himself
otherwise than as a cog in a wheel. Fichte accepts the ego, or spirit,
as the ultimate and absolute principle, because it alone can give our
life worth and meaning. Thus he grounds his entire philosophy upon a
moral imperative which presents itself to the ego in an inner vision.
He also tells us that we can become immediately aware of the
pure activity of the ego, of our free action, in a similar act of
intellectual intuition. But we cannot know this free act unless we
perform it ourselves; no one can understand the idealistic philosophy
who is not free; hence philosophy begins with an act of freedom--_im
Anfang war die Tat_.

In order that we may rise to free action, opposition is needed, and
this we get in the spatial-temporal world of phenomena, or nature,
which the ego creates for itself in order to have resistance to
overcome. Fichte conceives of nature as "the material of our duty,"
as the obstacle against which the ego can exercise its freedom. There
could be no free action without something to act upon, and there could
be no purposive action without a world in which everything happens
according to law; and such a causal world we have in our phenomenal