Fichte purified the system of Kant of all its inconsistent and humane
elements; he set forth the subjective system of knowledge and action in
its frankest and most radical form. The ego, in order to live a full
and free life, posited or feigned a world of circumstances, in the
midst of which it might disport itself; but this imagined theatre was
made to suit the play, and though it might seem to oppress the Will
with all sorts of hindrances, and even to snuff it out altogether, it
was really only a mirage which that Will, being wiser than it knew, had
raised in order to enjoy the experience of exerting itself manfully.
It would seem obvious from this that the Will could never be defeated,
and that in spite of its name it was identical with destiny or the laws
of nature: and those transcendentalists who lean to naturalism, or
pass into it unawares, like Schelling or Emerson, actually understand
the absolute Will in this way. But not so Fichte, nor what I take to
be the keener and more heroic romantic school, whose last prophet
was Nietzsche. The Germans, in [Pg 66] the midst of their fantastic
metaphysics, sometimes surprise us by their return to immediate
experience: after all, it was in wrestling with the Lord that their
philosophy was begotten. As a matter of fact, the will is often
defeated--especially if we are stubborn in defining our will;
and this tragic fact by no means refutes the Fichtean philosophy,
which knows how to deal with it heroically. It conceives that what is
inviolable is only what ought to be, the unconscious plan or idea of
perfect living which is hidden in the depths of all life: a will not
animated in some measure by this idea cannot exist, or at least cannot
be noticed or respected by this philosophy. But when, where, how often
and how far this divine idea shall be carried out is left unexplained.
Actual will may be feeble or wicked in any degree; and in consequence
the world that ought to be evoked in its maximum conceivable richness,
may dwindle and fade to nothing.
The Will may accordingly be defeated; not, indeed, by imagined
external things, but by its own apathy and tergiversation. In this
case, according to the logic of this system (which is as beautifully
thought out as that of Plotinus), the dissolving world will appear to
be overwhelmingly formidable and real. In expiring because we have no
longer the warmth to keep it alive, it will seem to be killing us; for
the passivity of the ego, says Fichte, is posited as activity [Pg 67]
in the non-ego. That way of speaking is scholastic; but the thought, if
we take the egotistical point of view, is deep and true.
So any actual will may perish by defect and die out; but actual will
may also perish by sublimation. The true object of absolute Will is
not things or pleasures or length of life, but willing itself; and the
more intense and disinterested this willing is, the better it manifests
absolute Will. The heroic act of dashing oneself against overwhelming
obstacles may, therefore, be the highest fulfilment of the divine idea.
The will dares to perish in order to have dared everything. In its
material ruin it remains ideally victorious. If we consider the matter
under the form of eternity, we shall see that this heroic and suicidal
will has accomplished what it willed; it has not only lived perilously
but perished nobly.
It is hardly necessary to point out how completely this theory
justifies any desperate enterprise to which one happens to be wedded.
It justifies, for instance, any wilful handling of history and science.
The Will by right lays down the principles on which things must and
shall be arranged. If things slip somehow from the traces, so much the
grander your "scientific deed" in striving to rein them in. After all,
you first summoned them into being only that you might drive them.
If they seem to run wild and upset you, [Pg 68] like the steeds of
Hippolytus, you will, at least, not have missed the glory, while you
lived and drove, of assuming the attitude of a master. Call spirits
from the vasty deep: if they do not come, what of it? That will only
prove the absolute self-sufficiency of your duty to call them.
What tightens this speculative bond between Fichte and the Nietzschean
school is that he himself applied his theory of absolute Will to
national life. This ego, which was identical with mind in general,
he identified also with the German people. If the Germans suffered
their national will to be domesticated in the Napoleonic empire, the
creative spirit of the universe would be extinguished, and God himself,
who existed only when incarnate in mankind, would disappear. It was
evidently one's duty to prevent this if possible; and Fichte poured out
all the vehemence of his nature into the struggle for freedom. The mere
struggle, the mere protest in the soul, according to his system, would
secure the end desired: self-assertion, not material success, was the
goal. A happy equilibrium once established in human life would have
been only a temptation, a sort of Napoleonic or Mephistophelian quietus
falling on the will to strive.
I am not sure how far Fichte, in his romantic and puritan tension
of soul, would have' relished the [Pg 69] present organisation of
Germany. He was a man of the people, a radical and an agitator as much
as a prophet of nationalism, and the shining armour in which German
freedom is now encased might have seemed to him too ponderous. He might
have discerned in victory the beginning of corruption.
Nevertheless we should remember that a perfected idealism has a
tendency to change into its opposite and become a materialism for all
practical purposes. Absolute Will is not a natural being, not anybody's
will or thought; it is a disembodied and unrealised genius which first
comes into operation when it begins to surround itself with objects
and points of resistance, so as to become aware of its own stress
and vocation. What these objects or felt resistances may be is not
prejudged; or rather it is prejudged that they shall be most opposite
to spirit, and that spirit shall experience its own passivity--one
mode of its fated and requisite experience--in the form of an
influence which it imputes to dead and material things.
The whole business of spirit may, therefore, well be with matter.
Science might be mechanical, art might be cumbrous and material,
all the instruments of life might be brutal, life itself might be
hard, bitter, and obsessed, and yet the whole might remain a direct
manifestation of pure spirit, absolute freedom, and creative duty.
This speculative possibility [Pg 70] is worth noting: it helps us to
understand modern Germany. It is no paradox that idealists should be so
much at home among material things. These material things, according
to them, are the offspring of their spirit. Why should they not sink
fondly into the manipulation of philological details or chemical
elements, or over-ingenious commerce and intrigue? Why should they
not dote on blood and iron? Why should these fruits of the spirit be
uncongenial to it?
A theoretical materialist, who looks on the natural world as on a soil
that he has risen from and feeds on, may perhaps feel a certain piety
towards those obscure abysses of nature that have given him birth; but
his delight will be rather in the clear things of the imagination,
in the humanities, by which the rude forces of nature are at once
expressed and eluded. Not so the transcendentalist. Regarding his mind
as the source of everything, he is moved to solemn silence and piety
only before himself: on the other hand, what bewitches him, what he
loves to fondle, is his progeny, the material environment, the facts,
the laws, the blood, and the iron in which he conceives (quite truly,
perhaps) that his spirit perfectly and freely expresses itself. To
despise the world and withdraw into the realm of mind, as into a
subtler and more congenial sphere, is quite contrary to his idealism.
Such a retreat might bring him [Pg 71] peace, and he wants war. His
idealism teaches him that strife and contradiction, as Heraclitus said,
are the parents of all things; and if he stopped striving, if he grew
sick of ambition and material goods, he thinks he would be forsaking
life, for he hates as he would death what another kind of idealists
have called salvation.
We are told that God, when he had made the world, found it very good,
and the transcendentalist, when he assumes the Creator's place, follows
his example. The hatred and fear of matter is perhaps not a sign of a
pure spirit. Even contemplatively, a divine mind may perfectly well
fall in love with matter, as the Moon-goddess did with Endymion. Such
matter might be imagined only, as if Diana had merely dreamt of her
swain; and the fond image might not be less dear on that account. The
romantic poet finds his own spirit greeting him in rocks, clouds, and
waves; the musician pours out his soul in movement and tumult; why
should not the transcendental general, or engineer, or commercial
traveller find his purest ideal in trade, crafts, and wars? Grim work,
above all, is what absolute Will demands. It needs the stimulus of
resistance to become more intensely conscious of Self, which is said
to be its ultimate object in imagining a world at all. Acquisition
interests it more than possession, because the sense [Pg 72] of effort
and power is then more acute. The more material the arts that engage
it, and the more complicated and worldly its field of action, the more
intense will be its exertion, and the greater its joy. This is no
idealism for a recluse or a moping poet; it does not feel itself to be
something incidental and fugitive in the world, like a bird's note,
that it should fear to be drowned in the crash of material instruments
or to be forced to a hideous tension and shrillness: shrillness and
tension are its native element. It is convinced that it has composed
all the movements there are or can be in existence, and it feels all
the more masterful, the more numerous and thunderous is the orchestra
it leads. It is entirely at home in a mechanical environment, which it
can prove transcendentally to be perfectly ideal. Its most congenial
work is to hack its way through to the execution of its World-Plan. Its
most adequate and soul-satisfying expression is a universal battle.
[Pg 73] CHAPTER VII