[5] The antithesis has two members: the partial ego, and the non-ego, which confronts. The synthesis is a putting together two separate things, so as to correlate them; but it falls short of what would be understood in some present usage by 'synthetic unity' which has a certain mystical ring. It is important for a student of Schelling or Hegel to remember this distinction of synthesis from 'absolute unity e.g. Schelling, Werke, v. 43.
[6] A = A is the more purely logical formula: I=I presents it as a personal and metaphysical identity. The A, which is -A, is to be distinguished from the A which is opposed to not-A. But it is Fichte's standpoint to insist on their being one Ego.
[7] To give this interpretation of the larger Ego as Life and Blessedness is to assume that the teaching, e. g. of the Anweisung zum Seligen Leben, is the logical deepening of the earlier language about the Ego.
[8] Cf. the description of mind as 4 a bundle of impressions.'
[9] Especially given in the Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wiss. (Werke, i. 331). Of course Fichte goes through a corresponding 'deduction' of the emotional or moral nature. Schelling (System des transcend. Idealismus) works out the 'deduction' still more at length.
[10] Fichte, Werke, i. 286.
[11] Ibid. ii. 261.
[12] It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the state of affairs alluded to, which has its literary memorials in F. Schlegel's Lucinde, and in the warm defense of that book by Scheiermacher, was only a passing experiment in which a high-strung idealism amid a lax society sought for truth at all costs and dared a noble lie.
[13] In the Geschlossener Handelstaat (of 1800), the 'classical' document of characteristic German Socialism in its earlier and idealist phase.