forests and united together in masses. In the savage state each family had to provide for its manifold wants immediately and without assistance from others, and had even to fabricate for itself the utensils for that purpose, with much loss of time and waste of energy:—Now, the human multitudes are divided into classes, each of which pursues its own profession, to the acquirement and exercise of which its life is devoted; providing in its own department for all other classes, and provided for by them with respect to all its other wants; and thus are the forces of Nature confronted by the greatest possible amount of the cultivated, ordered and combined powers of Reason. The laws and their administrators interpose an insuperable barrier to the fury of personal warfare and spoliation; quarrels are adjusted without bloodshed, and the lust of crime is scared back by severe punishments into the dark recesses of thought;—and thus is internal peace secured, and every one moves in safety within the limits which are prescribed to him. Large masses of men, frequently sprung from the most dissimilar origin, and united one scarce knows how, encounter similar masses in as wonderful combination, and neither being fully acquainted with the power of the other, reciprocal fear steps in between them, so that men are sometimes blessed even with external tranquillity; or when it does come to war, the superior power is often worn out and broken by the determined resistance of its opponent, and instead of the secretly desired extermination, peace is the result;—and thus has sprung up a kind of international law between independent countries, and from among opposing tribes a kind of republic of nations has arisen. You know how, even to the present time, the timid savage, unacquainted even with himself, finds a hindrance or a destroying foe in every power of Nature. To us, Science has laid open our own spiritual being, and thereby, in a great measure, subjected to our will the outward physical forces of the universe. Mechanical science has multiplied, almost to infinity, the
Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/61
