[23] Woldemar, pp. 112-113.
[24] Monologen, in Werke, i. 366-368, 372.
[25] See the study of Hegel mentioned.
[THIRD SECTION]
UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL
Double result; precedence of the theoretical over the practical and of the practical over the theoretical.
The study of the practical activity in its relations that we made in the first section has removed all doubt as to the thesis that the practical activity presupposes the theoretical, or that knowledge is the necessary precedent of volition and action.[1] But the succeeding study of the practical activity in its dialectic having led to the result that the practical activity is reality itself in its immediacy, and that no other reality (or we may say other nature) is conceivable outside will-action, compels us also to affirm the opposite thesis, that the theoretic activity presupposes the practical, and that the will is the necessary precedent of knowledge.[2] And it is a precedent, not indeed in the sense admitted from the beginning, of the necessary implication of the will in every theoretical act, as will to know, by means of the unity of the Spirit[3] (for this will is subsidiary and not constitutive; but if it become constitutive it produces, as has been seen, wilfulness and the theoretical error[4]), but precisely in the sense of a constitutive will, without which no knowledge would be thinkable.
Knowledge, indeed, is knowledge of something: it is the remaking of a fact, an ideal recreation of a real creation. If there have not previously been a desire, an aspiration, a nostalgia, there cannot be poetry; if there have not been an impulse or a heroic deed, the epic cannot arise; if the sun do not illumine a landscape, or a soul invoke a ray of sunlight upon the countryside, the picture of a luminous landscape cannot exist. And if there be not a world of reality that generates a world of representations, Philosophy, which is the search for the universal, is not conceivable, nor History, the understanding of the individual.