[Literature] Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Facts of Consciousness #13/65

Thus we must make also our own world, the inner world of consciousness, our free property, and we are just now, in the present course of lectures, engaged upon this task, without however being able as yet to give an account of our proceeding, precisely because we are still engaged in the task.

9. Remarks.—I add the following pragmatical remarks: It is advisable to put the parts of such free constructions—particularly if these constructions are extensive—into a permanent and fixed form; for imagination, left to itself, flows, hurries, and gets confused easily. Imagination should, therefore, be tied down and brought under a supervision. In free thinking such a fixed form is writing. If the thinking was not close, this is more easily observed when writing it down or examining it after it has been written down; moreover, that which has been thus approved and secured from oblivion by its fixed form, gives a solid basis for further progress. In my opinion, a thorough and exhaustive thinking is not well possible otherwise than pen in hand.

The fixed form for reproduction through sight is drawing. The reproduction of a visible object must, firstly, seize the figure of that object with those innumerable and often imperceptible transitions from one shape into the other that we so often observe in objects of nature, while the drawing of the figure will testify as to the correct seizing and reproducing. The reproduction must, secondly, reproduce the size of the object.

In regard to the reproduction of the figure, we have an artificial assistant in reconstructing; for the science of geometry includes all possible figures, and hence every possible limitation in nature can be reduced to a geometrical figure. In regard to the size, we have no such assistant; it must be reawakened altogether by the above-described causality of imagination; but the power of attention can practice itself in this gift of reawakening. The result of such a practice is called a good eye for proportions and distances, and its attainment is to be proved by the drawing.

So far as the correct seizing and reproducing of colorin a visible object is concerned, it seems to me that this branch of the business is as yet altogether a matter of chance, and that hitherto no artificial means have been discovered to develop it.

The Ego has been posited absolutely through thinking; it exists absolutely independent of its own self-contemplation, and exists thus as free principle in the manner in which we have determined this conception above.

I add now: a principle is necessarily infinite. For if it ever ceased to be principle, and after any possible series of manifestations were finally to vanish altogether in some last one, it would not have been absolutely posited as principle, nor would being principle have constituted its real essence; it would have been simply the conditioned principle for such a determined series of manifestations.

In making this additional assertion, what sort of an insight do I produce in you? I reply that it is an insight created by an analysis of the given conception of a principle, and that we have found the conception of a principle to involve another conception. That is, if I—as I may or may not do—take hold of the conception of infinity, and, relating it to that of a principle, try to unite both in thinking, I discover that I not only can thus unite them, but must unite them. But infinity is rather a contemplation. Hence the proper expression in our case will be this: the conception of a principle—if that principle is not only thought but also contemplated, which may or may not be done—necessarily involves the law, that it can be contemplated only as an infinite principle. This is the fundamental law of analytical thinking, although an a priorilaw, which we here mention for the sake of logic which lacks it.

This infinite principle it is our present problem through our imagination to picture in its actual state of manifesting itself. It can be principle altogether only my relation to itself—since there exists nothing outside of it—and in relation to itself only as a development or confining of freedom, since it is not capable of any other determination.

We have already spoken before of a development and confinedness of a freedom through which alone the various fundamental forms of consciousness can arise, but had then good reasons to suppose that this sort of development had its determined terminus a quoand ad quem, and that it formed a circumscribed sphere, and that, therefore, the principle was finite in relation to it.