as implies a constant progress from the less to the more complete realisation of those ends.1 All these conceptions-difficult they are to harmonise with the fundamental idea of Contract—are doubtless to be found in Rousseau. But they are not so definitely realised, nor so clearly worked out, by him as by Fichte. 1 Beiträge, pp. 101-105. Keine Staatsverfassung ist una bänderlich; es ist in ihrer Natur, dass sie sich alle ändern' (p. 103). CHAPTER III FICHTE THE close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth were no less stirring in the history of thought than in that of action. The Revolutionists and Napoleon and the heroes of the Liberation recast the outward map of Europe; the German philosophers did no less for the world of thought. And in no sphere of thought was the change more searching than in the region of political belief. The practical ideals of men were thrown into a new mould as they passed through the fiery furnace of the Revolution; their theory of the State was of necessity remodelled to correspond. In political theory, as in other branches of speculation, the beginning of this process is represented by Kant, and its completion by Hegel. And here, still more clearly perhaps than elsewhere, the passage from the one to the other is recorded in the various stages of the work of Fichte. Starting from a position hardly to be distinguished from that of Rousseau, Fichte ends with a creed which only needs more of systematic reflection and less fervour of moral appeal to form at least the foundation of the edifice of Hegel. The individualism of his earlier writings is gradually replaced by a theory which errs, if it errs at all, by allowing too much, rather than too little, to the supremacy of the State. The cosmopolitan of 1793 closed his days with a trumpet call to the slowly wakening genius of German nationality. The professor of abstract, and therefore stationary, rights spoke his last and his best as the inspired champion of progress. The steps of this significant transformation are clearly marked. The first is found in the Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urtheile über die französische Revolution, of 1793; the second in the Grundlage des Naturrechts, published in 1796; the third and last in the Staatslehre, delivered as lectures in 1813, the last year of Fichte's life, and published in 1820. There are two other important, but less systematic, writings; the earlier of which, Der geschlossene Handelstaat (1800), stands in close relation to the Grundlage of 1796; while the later, the famous Reden an die deutsche Nation (1807-8), is drawn from the same vein of thought as the Staatslehre of 1813. It marks the beginning, as the Staatslehre marks the close, of the movement which resulted in the triumphant struggle against the tyranny of Napoleon. From first to last Fichte, in this as in other fields of philosophy, is a pioneer. It is this that makes his importance in the history of political thought. He moves in the van of a great host, the picked men of his nation. And, like them, he is slowly feeling his way from one ideal to another; from the rule of the individual to that of the community; from anarchy to a reasoned conception of government and of national responsibility. Hence each of his political treatises corresponds, more or less closely, to one of the turning-points in the great European struggle of his day: the Beiträge to the Jacobin domination and the Reign of Terror; the Grundlage to the first decisive triumph of Napoleon, the child and champion of Jacobinism,' in Italy; the Geschlossene Handelstaat, a strange forecast of the continental Blockade, to the First Consulate, the Constitution of the year VIII. and the battle of Marengo; the Reden to the treaty of Tilsit and the uprising of the Spanish nation against the insolent usurpations of Napoleon; the Staatslehre to the humiliation of the universal tyrant at Moscow, and the birth of the German nation amid the throes of the war of Liberation. Each Thus, by its very groping and incompleteness, the work of Fichte is a faithful record, the most full and accurate that has come down to us, of the mental struggles of his generation. Other thinkers of the time, notably Schelling and Hegel, must have gone through much the same process of development. They too, as legend relates, began by planting a tree of liberty in the public square a feat which Fichte may be said to have emulated in the Beiträge. But Hegel, at any rate, worked and grew in silence; while Fichte not only planted his tree, but pruned it, uprooted it and set another in its stead, with all Europe looking on. stage of the process, moreover, was loudly proclaimed to be the last. Each theory in turn-it might be an echo of Rousseau, it might be an anticipation of Hegel-was uttered with all the fervid conviction-and, it must be added, with all the bans and curses of the one true political gospel. The prophetic strain had the mastery of all others in the nature of Fichte. He had neither the philosophic detachment of Hegel nor his patient depth of speculation. But for that very reason he appealed to the hearts of men with a power which was unknown to the younger thinker; and in the supreme crisis of his nation's history he played a part which was certainly more glorious than that subsequently played by Hegel, the theorist and idolater of Prussian bureaucracy, and which neither Germany nor Europe can ever willingly suffer to be forgotten. The earliest of Fichte's works, the Beiträge, is so manifestly modelled on the Social Contract that a detailed examination of it is hardly needed for our present purpose. It is, in fact, the political theory of Rousseau-as that theory was interpreted by the Revolutionists-tacked on to the moral theory of Kant. Its main interest lies in the clear proof it offers a proof, indeed, little needed by those who have studied both authors with attentionhow close was the affinity between Kant and Rousseau; and how, in the region of morals and to some extent also of politics, the former did little more than bring out into clear consciousness the ideas implicitly contained, though doubtless but half realised and imperfectly worked out, in the writings of the latter. This double affinity appears, no doubt, less in the main body of the treatise than in the setting which surrounds it. The political principle of the Beiträge, as will be seen, is individualism pure and simple. It is a refinement on the theory of the Social Contract as understood, or rather glossed, by the critics and interpreters of Rousseau; and a mere travesty of that theory as it took shape in the mind of Rousseau himself and, still more, as it was subsequently remodelled by Kant. But with the moral theory, in which this exaggeration of revolutionary politics is embedded, the case is different. The very completeness with which Fichte separates the sphere of politics from that of morals enables him, while departing from the Social Contract in the former region, to support, and indeed most significantly to enforce, the conception that underlies it in the latter. The master passion of Rousseau was moral rather than political; and the idea that inspires all his writings is a burning faith that the will of man is a law unto itself. It is, indeed, sometimes supposed that to Rousseau the will of man means merely the caprice of the individual. That, however, is certainly not the case. Throughout his writings it is not on the individual, but on the universal, element of the will and reason-not on what severs men, but on what unites them-that he lays stress. It is not to the will of the isolated atoms, the volonté de tous, but to the permanent reason' of man as disciplined by Society, the volonté générale, the moi transporté dans l'unité commune,1 that he appeals. It is clear that this conception only needs a more speculative treatment, such a handling as would bring it into connection with metaphysics as well as with ethics and politics, to become the autonomy of the will, the source of the categorical 1 Emile, p. 9. [Euvres complètes de J.-J. R. (Paris, 1836), ii. 401-2.] imperative, as conceived by Kant. The substantial agreement of the two writers is, indeed, obscured by certain differences on points which, though by no means trivial, are certainly of less importance. Thus, however little it may square with the commonly received opinion about him, Rousseau gives far greater weight to the formative influence of society upon the individual than was ever done, or could ever have been done, by Kant. The 'law' of which Kant speaks is a law graven on the heart of the individual. That of Rousseau, however keen his sense of individuality, is rather one writ large in the collective conscience of the community. What both writers, however, value in the individual is not that which calls him apart from other men, but that which he holds in common with them; not that which prompts him to follow the blind instincts of caprice, but that which bids him guide his own conduct by principles that can be taken as a law binding upon all. Neither of them is an individualist, in the only sense in which that term can legitimately be used; and Rousseau, when allowance has been made for certain obvious inconsistencies, is so even less than Kant. Now, individualist as is the political theory of the Beiträge, at any rate in its main scope and purport, its moral ideas are avowedly drawn from Kant. Fichte is as positive as Kant in placing the moral life of man under the control of universal laws, and in tracing those laws to the sole authority of the human will. He is as explicit in rejecting all those considerations, whether of lasting happiness or the pleasure of the moment, which had supplied the staple of eighteenth-century Ethics and which, at any rate in the less extreme form of happiness,' go some way to vitiate the moral conceptions even of Rousseau. More than this; to Fichte, as to Kant, the true self of man-that which, far more than his speculative capacity or his power of interpreting nature, marks his 'sovereignty of reason,' is to be found in the will; in its originative faculty; in its capacity for determining itself by its own laws, without regard to the promptings of sense or of anything beyond the ends which it draws from its own nature and imposes on its own activity. One passage will suffice to illustrate this side of Fichte's early speculation: We feel the need of judging the facts of human conduct by a law which is not itself drawn from any fact and cannot be contained in any fact. Whence can we expect to draw such a law, and where can we hope to find it? Beyond doubt, in our own Self; in our Self, so far as it is not moulded by outward things through the medium of experience, since what is so moulded is not our true Self but an accretion from without; in the pure, original form of the Self, as it would be when stripped of all experience. The difficulty, no doubt, is to strip off all such alien elements from VOL. II H |