Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/457

THE PRACTICAL EGO. 435 world exists only to furnish us the possibility of fulfilling our duty. We are intelligence in order that we may be able to be will. Action, action — that is the end of our existence. Action is giving form to matter, it is the alteration or elaboration of an object, the conquest of an impediment, of a lim- itation. We cannot act unless we have something in, on, and against which to act. The world of sensation and intuition is nothing but a means for attaining our ethical destiny, it is " the material of our duty under the form of sense." The theoretical ego posits an object {Gegenstand) that the practical ego may experience resistance {Wider- stand?) No action is possible without a world as the object of action ; no world is possible without a consciousness which represents it ; no consciousness possible without reflection of the ego on itself ; no reflection without lim- itation, without an opposition or non-ego. The Anstoss is deduced. The ego posits a limit (is theoretical) in order (as practical) to overcome it. Our duty is the only per se {Ansich) of the phenomenal world, the only truly real element in it : " Things are in themselves that which we ought to make of them." Objectivity exists only to be more and more sublated, that is, to be so worked up that the activity of the ego may in it become evident. — The^ same ground of explanation which reveals the necessity of > an external nature enables us to understand why the one infinite ego (the universal life or the Deity, as Fichte puts ■ it in his later works) divides into the many empirical egos or individuals, why it does not carry out its plan im- mediately, but through finite spirits as its organs. Action is possible only under the form of the individual, only in individuals are consciousness and morality possible. With- out resistance, no action ; without conflict, no morality. Individuality, it is true, is to be overcome and destroyed in moral endeavor; but in order to this it must have existed. Virtue is a conquest over external and internal nature. A gradation of practical functions corresponding to the series of theoretical activities leads from feeling and striv- ing (longing and desire) through the system of impulses (the impulse to representation or reflection, to production.