THE INFLUENCE OF KANT.—The influence of Kant has been incomparable or, if you will, comparable only to those of Plato, Zeno, and Epicurus. Half at least of the European philosophy of the nineteenth century has proceeded from him and is closely connected with him. Even in our own day, pragmatism, as it is called—that is, the doctrine which lays down that morality is the measure of truth and that an idea is true only if it be morally useful—is perhaps an alteration of Kantism, a Kantian heresy, but entirely penetrated with and, as it were, excited by the spirit of Kant.
CHAPTER VII. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: GERMANY
The great reconstructors of the world, analogous to the first philosophers of antiquity.
Great general systems: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.
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 too radical in the idealism of Fichte. He restored the external world; for him the non-ego and the ego both exist and the two are nature, nature which is the object in the world regarded by man, the subject when it regards man, subject and object according to the case; in itself and in its totality neither subject nor object, but absolute, unlimited, indeterminate. Confronting this world (that is nature and man) there is another world which is God. God is the infinite and the perfect, and particularly the perfect and infinite will. The world that we know is a debasement from that without our being able to conceive how the perfect can be degraded, and how an emanation of the perfect can be imperfect and how the non-being can come out of being, since relatively to the infinite, the finite has no existence, and relatively to perfection, the imperfect is nothing.