But, what Fichte forgot was the consideration that the Ego cannot make any genuine, well-grounded decision or choice, unless something is presupposed which helps the Ego to choose. All the Ego’s attempts at determination remain empty and without content, if the Ego does not find something wholly determinate and full of content, which enables it to determine the Given, and thereby also to choose between Idealism and Dogmatism. This “something wholly determinate and full of content” is, precisely, the world of Thought. And the determination of the Given by thinking is, precisely, what we call cognition. We may take Fichte where we please—everywhere we find that his line of thought at once gets meaning and substance, as soon as we conceive his grey, empty activity of the Ego to be filled and regulated by what we have called “the process of cognition.”
The fact that the Ego is free to enter into activity out of itself, makes it possible for it, by free self-determination, to realise the category of cognition, whereas in the rest of the world all categories are connected by objective necessity with the Given which corresponds to them. The investigation of the nature of free self-determination will be the task of Ethics and Metaphysics, based on our Theory of Knowledge. These disciplines, too, will have to debate the question whether the Ego is able to realise other ideas, besides the idea of cognition. But, that the realisation of the idea of cognition issues from a free act has been made sufficiently clear in the course of our discussions above. For, the synthesis, effected by the Ego, of the Immediately-Given and of the Form of Thought appropriate to it, which two factors of reality remain otherwise always divorced from each other in consciousness, can be brought about only by an act of freedom. Moreover, our arguments throw, in another way, quite a fresh light on Critical Idealism. To any close student of Fichte’s system it will appear as if Fichte cared for nothing so much as for the defence of the proposition, that nothing can enter the Ego from without, that nothing can appear in the Ego which was not the Ego’s own original creation. Now, it is beyond all dispute that no type of Idealism will ever be able to derive from within the Ego that form of the world-content which we have called “the Immediately-Given.” For, this form can only be given; it can never be constructed by thinking. In proof of this, it is enough to reflect that, even if the whole series of colours were given to us except one, we should not be able to fill in that one out of the bare Ego. We can form an image of the most remote countries, though we have never seen them, provided we have once personally experienced, as given, the details which go to form the image. We then build up the total picture, according to the instructions supplied to us, out of the particular facts which we have ourselves experienced. But we shall strive in vain to invent out of ourselves even a single perceptual element which has never appeared within the sphere of what has been given to us. It is one thing to be merely acquainted with the world; it is another to have knowledge of its essential nature. This nature, for all that it is closely identified with the world-content, does not become clear to us unless we build up reality ourselves out of the Given and the Forms of Thought. The real “what” of the Given comes to be affirmed for the Ego only through the Ego itself. The Ego would have no occasion to affirm the nature of the Given for itself, if it did not find itself confronted at the outset by the Given in wholly indeterminate form. Thus, the essential nature of the world is affirmed, not apart from, but through, the Ego.
The true form of reality is not the first form in which it presents itself to the Ego, but the last form which it receives through the activity of the Ego. That first form is, in fact, without any importance for the objective world and counts only as the basis for the process of cognition. Hence, it is not the form given to the world by theory which is subjective, but rather the form in which the world is originally given to the Ego. If, following Volkelt and others, we call the given world “experience,” our view amounts to saying: The world-picture presents itself, owing to the constitution of our consciousness, in subjective form as experience, but science completes it and makes its true nature manifest.
Our Theory of Knowledge supplies the basis for an Idealism which, in the true sense of the word, understands itself. It supplies good grounds for the conviction that thinking brings home to us the essential nature of the world. Nothing but thinking can exhibit the relations of the parts of the world-content, be it the relation of the heat of the sun to the stone which it warms, or the relation of the Ego to the external world. Thinking alone has the function of determining all things in their relations to each other.
The objection might still be urged by the followers of Kant, that the determination, above-described, of the Given holds, after all, only for the Ego. Our reply must be, consistently with our principles, that the distinction between Ego and Outer World, too, holds only within the Given, and that, therefore, it is irrelevant to insist on the phrase, “for the Ego,” in the face of the activity of thinking which unites all opposites. The Ego, as divorced from the outer world, disappears completely in the process of thinking out the nature of the world. Hence it becomes meaningless still to talk of determinations which hold only for the Ego.
[1] It ought not to be necessary to say that the term “centre,” here, is not intended to affirm a theory concerning the nature of consciousness, but is used merely as a shorthand expression for the total physiognomy of consciousness. [↑]