outside of ourselves could only command us, becomes a privilege to which
we need no commandment, but to the fulfilment of which, rather, we are
drawn in joy by the forces of our own being. How a man could, even in
the immature stages of these thoughts, have been persecuted for atheism,
it is not easy to see, although we may admit that his earlier forms of
statement were bewildering. When we have his whole thought before us we
should say rather that it borders on acosmic pantheism, for which
everything is God and the world does not exist.

We have no need to follow Fichte farther. Suffice it to say, with
reference to the theory of knowledge, that he had discovered that one
could not stand still with Kant. One must either go back toward the
position of the old empiricism which assumed the reality of the world
exactly as it appeared, or else one must go forward to an idealism more
thorough-going than Kant had planned. Of the two paths which, with all
the vast advance of the natural sciences, the thought of the nineteenth
century might traverse, that of the denial of everything except the
mechanism of nature, and that of the assertion that nature is but the
organ of spirit and is instinct with reason, Fichte chose the latter and
blazed out the path along which all the idealists have followed him. In
reference to the philosophy of religion, we must say that, with all the
extravagance, the pantheism and mysticism of his phrases, Fichte's great
contribution was his breaking down of the old dualism between God and
man which was still fundamental to Kant. It was his assertion of the
unity of man and God and of the life of God in man. This thought has
been appropriated in all of modern theology.


SCHELLING