FICHTE.--Fichte, embarrassed by what remained of experience in the
ideas of Kant, by the part, restricted though it was, which Kant left to
things in the external world, completely suppressed the external world,
like Berkeley, and affirmed the existence of the human _ego_
alone. Kant said that the world furnished us with the matter of the idea
and that we furnished the form. According to Fichte, form and matter alike
came from us. What then is sensation? It is nothing except the pause of the
_ego_ encountering what is not self, the impact of the _ego_
against what limits it.--But then the external world does exist, for how
could our mind be encountered by nothing and there be an impact of our mind
against nothing?--But this non-self that encounters self is precisely a
product of self, a product of the imagination which creates an object,
which projects outside us an appearance before which we pause as before
something real which should be outside us.

This theory is very difficult to understand, but indicates a very fine
effort of the mind.

Yet outside ourselves is there anything? There is pure spirit, God. What
is God? For Fichte He is moral order (a very evident recollection of
Kant). Morality is God and God is morality. We are in God, and it is the
whole of religion, when we do our duty without any regard to the
consequences of our actions; we are outside God, and it is atheism, when we
act in view of what results our actions may have. And thus morality and
religion run into one another, and religion is only morality in its
plenitude and complete morality is the whole of religion. "The holy, the
beautiful, and the good are the immediate apparition [if it could be] in us
of the essence of God."

SCHELLING.--Schelling desired to correct what, according to him, was