Memoir Of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1846)

MEMOIR OF JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE, BY WILLIAM SMITH. BOSTON JAMES MUNROE AND COMPAJNY. 1846. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1846, by JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY, in the Clerks Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. BOSTON PBINTED BY THUK8TON, TOBBY EMERSON, 31, Devonshire Street. PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. BUT few words need be wasted in introducing to Amer ican readers a man so great and self-sufficing as Fichte was so thoroughly able to speak for himself. Only a kindly sentence or two, to make us feel perfectly at home in his company, and to mark the particular coincidence of his genius with our present literary wants and prospects. We shall welcome him because he was a man of action and we need him because he was a man of thought. No where can we find so grand a specimen of complete har mony of speculation and practice, such a healthy, sinewy nature, constantly proving all his problems by the heroism of daily life. Goethe spent eighty years in self-culture Schiller wore himself out with asking Pilates question, and his results were always aesthetic Schelling rebuked Fichte for deserting the scholars province, and carrying out spec ulation to its ultimates. But that very idea was the best in Fichtes possession if it did not rather possess him namely, that the moral order of the Universe was the ob ject of life. He stood ready to prove this by syllogism or by sacrifice not only by an irreproachable character, but by deeds of great note in their time. And these were not forced upon him by circumstance or position, or merely assumed as stints, but they were elements of him and of his system the necessary results of the man, as much as 4PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. the tone and contour of his features. Therefore we do not consider him notable merely because, while the best scholars of Germany were elaborating morphologies and constructing syntheses of Nature, he humanized life in Universities, made virtue the rage, set all the students at Napoleon, and was so adroit at revolutionizing Germany, that he got his name on the emperors private proscription list but because his system of thought would have com pelled him to do the best things in any era, because, in short, he represented the union of remote abstraction with earnest reality. He was knowledge, and he was power he thought the subtlest thoughts into deeds he condensed that German gas a result which worthy men among us still consider to be too much for the most ponderous hy draulics. Then while we smile most shrewdly at some of his met aphysical statements, and the Fichteari Egoism is dismissed with general merriment, and flourish of Scotch and Eng lish reviewers trumpets, we still have a suspicion that all is not right, and that it must be the man himself which makes his own statement appear so wretched. Fichte had his Theory of the Universe a German would sooner be without his pipe than a compact, pocket cosmo-ontology. We all construct the same, with more or less absurdity, by the same instinct that sets the beaver to build his dam and we are ready to swear by it stoutly to every passenger. But the first dun, or new music, or outrage upon misery, or note of reform, makes us suddenly serious we drop the cap and bells, and the noblest theory of the universe is demonstrated in the play or the gravity of our deeds. Set ting aside Fichtes bare ontologicalstatement, which after all was only a chance stone which he made his fulcrum, we find the grandest use and meaning in his moral system, PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 5 and all the merit of practical consistency...