430 FICHTE. [object]. The purg fjgnj^s.not a fact, but an original doing, the act of being for self {Fiirsichsein), arid the (philosoph- ical, or — as seems to be the case according to some pas- sages — even the common) consciousness of this doing an intellectual intuition ; through this we become conscious of the deed-act which is ever (though unconsciously) per- forming. This is the meaning of the first of the principles : " The ego posits originally and absolutely its own being," or, more briefly : The ego posits itself ; more briefly still: I am. The nature of the ego consists in positing itself as existing.* Since, besides this self-cogitation of the ego, an op-position is found among the facts of empirical conscious- ness (think only of the principle of contradiction), and yet, besides tiie ego, there is nothing which could be opposed, we must assume as a second principle : To the ego there -^ is absolutely opposited a non-ego. These two principles « must be united, and this can be accomplished only by positing the contraries (ego and non-ego), since they are both in the ego, as reciprocally limiting or partially sublat- ing one another, that is, each as divisible (capable of quanti- tative determination). Accordingly the third principle runs: "The ego opposes in the ego a divisible non-ego to the divisible ego." From these principles Fichte deduces the three laws of thought, i dent ity, conitadiction, and suflR- cient,jieason, and the three categories of quality — reality, negation, and limitation or determination. Instead of following him in these labors, we may emphasize the signifi- cance of his view of__ihe ego as pure activity without an v1 underlying substratum, with which he carries dynamism over from the Kantian philosophy of nature to meta-
- The ego spoken of in the first of the principles, the ego as the object of
intellectual intuition and as the ground and creator of all being, is, as the second hitroduction to the Science of Knowledge clearly announces, not the individual, but the I-ness {Tchheit) (which is to be presupposed as the prius of the manifold of representation, and which is exalted above the opposition of subject and object), mentality in general, eternal reason, which is common to all and the same in all, which is present in all thinking and at the basis thereof, and to which particular persons stand related merely as accidents, as instruments, as special expressions, destined more and more to lose themselves in the universal form of reason. But, further still, a distinction must be made between the absolute ego as intuition (as the form of I-ness), from which the Science of Knowl- edge starts, and the ego as Idea (as the supreme goal of practical endeavor), x/
