comfort and security of life as means to moral volition are to be achieved. But a state engaged in unrestricted foreign trade will leave its workingmen at the mercy of foreign conditions. It must therefore regulate or even eliminate foreign commerce so far as is necessary to secure its own citizens. The ultimate goal is a universal state as wide as humanity, and a state in which each individual will act freely, without state-secured rights and state-imposed obligations. But before this cosmopolitan and philosophically anarchic condition can be reached, we must pass through a period of the nationalistic closed state. Thus at the end a wide gulf separates Fichte from Kant. The moral individualism of the latter has become an ethical socialism. Only in and by means of a circle of egos or personalities does a human being attain the moral reason and freedom which Kant bestowed upon him as his birthright. Only through the educational activities of the State and its complete regulation of the industrial activities of its members does the potential moral freedom of individuals become an established reality.
If I have devoted so much space to Fichte it is not because of his direct influence upon
affairs or even upon thought. He did not found a school. His system was at once too personal and too formal. Nevertheless, he expressed ideas which, removed from their special context in his system, were taken up into the thought of cultivated Germany. Heine, speaking of the vogue of systems of thought, says with profound truth that "nations have an instinctive presentiment of what they require to fulfill their mission."
And Fichte's thought infiltrated through many crevices. Rodbertus and Lasalle, the socialists, were, for example, profoundly affected by him. When the latter was prosecuted in a criminal suit for his "Programme of Workingmen," his reply was that his programme was a distinctively philosophic utterance, and hence protected by the constitutional provision for freedom of science and its teaching. And this is his philosophy of the State:
"The State is the unity and coöperation of individuals in a moral whole. . . . The ultimate and intrinsic end of the State is, therefore, to further the positive unfolding, the progressive development of human life. Its function is to work out the true end of man; that is to say, the full degree of culture of which human nature is capable."
And he quotes with approval the words:
"The concept of the State must be broadened so as to make the State the contrivance whereby all human virtue is to be realized to the full."
And if he differs from Fichte, it is but in the assertion that since the laboring class is the one to whom the need most directly appeals, it is workingmen who must take the lead in the development of the true functions of the State.
Pantheism is a philosophic nickname which should be sparingly employed; so also should the term Monism. To call Fichte's system an ethical pantheism and monism is not to say much that is enlightening. But with free interpretation the designation may be highly significant in reference to the spiritual temper of the Germany of the first part of the nineteenth century. For it gives a key to the presentiment of what Germany needed to fulfill its mission.
It is a commonplace of German historians that its unity and expansion to a great state powerful