our mental history and to arrive at the original form of the Self. If, however, we can discover any element of our nature which, having nothing in common with experience, cannot by any possibility have sprung from experience, we should certainly be entitled to conclude that this is the original form of our Self. And such an element we do find in the law of duty. If this law is to be found in our heart—and that it is to be found there is a plain matter of fact-it cannot be a foreign accretion; for it is the very antithesis of anything that we can acquire by experience. This, therefore, must be the pure form of our Self.' 1 The conception is identical with that of the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft; it reappears more than once in the later parts of the Beiträge; and in one form or another, Fichte, as will be seen, remained faithful to it until the end. To pass from the moral to the political aspect of the Beiträge is a curious contrast. The relation between them is, in fact, purely one of opposition. Morals, in Fichte's view, is the sphere of duty and inflexible law; politics, on the other hand, is the sphere of caprice. There the moral law is silent, and we stand free to act purely as we please.' This clean severance between morals and politics was, no doubt, the natural outcome of the individualist theory which Fichte took over from the dominant school of his own day. But no previous writer had realised the necessity of the severance so clearly as Fichte, and none had accepted its consequences so unreservedly.

2

Nowhere does this appear so markedly as in Fichte's treatment of the chief issue with which the Beiträge is concerned. One of the main questions raised by the Revolution in the minds of those who witnessed it was this: Has a nation the right to change its constitution as, and when, it thinks fit, or is it bound by the conventions and traditions of the past? Few men nowadays would be prepared to deny such a right, or indeed to feel anything but wonder that it should ever have been challenged. But contemporary writings, notably Burke's Reflections, afford ample evidence that it was so; and Fichte was justified in thinking that no defence of the Revolution which failed to meet the issue was likely to win, or deserved to win, a hearing. It is, in fact, with this issue that the first, and most important, part of the Beiträge is entirely taken up.

Other advocates of individual rights-though not, it must be remembered, Rousseau-had surrounded the Social Contract with a kind of religious terror. They had sought to draw from it indirectly and by a side-wind that compulsive force which instinct 1 Beiträge, Einleitung, § 1; Fichte's Werke, vi. 59.

2 Das Sittengesetz schweigt, und wir stehen bloss unter unserer Willkür' (ib. p. 60).

taught them to be necessary to the State but which their principles forbade them to recognise directly and on its own merits. Fichte begins by boldly acknowledging the fallacy of this expedient. He at once recognises that, given the principle of individual rights, no tradition however sacred and no contract however equitable can be permanently binding. What gives authority to the social contract, as to every other form of contract, is that it represents the spontaneous act, the unforced will, of the individual. It follows that, directly such a contract ceases to embody his will, directly its fulfilment ceases to be his spontaneous desire, its virtue is lost and he is at liberty to withdraw from its obligations. The question whether a contract once made can be altered and the question whether it can be made in the first instance are identical.' 1

Each man who withdraws from the State is, no doubt, bound to make compensation for any loss that other parties may be proved to suffer by his change of purpose. But the fact is that no such loss is possible; and the belief that it is, is merely due to a confusion between the conditions of the social contract and those of the business contracts so familiar to us as between man and man. Till the moment of withdrawal, the supposed person has, ex hypothesi, discharged his duties to and in the State; and apart from those duties, now legitimately renounced, neither the State nor any individual in it has the smallest claim upon him. His obligations to the State, so long as they lasted, were absolutely definite and tangible the payment of taxes, the observance of civil laws and regulations; and to say that to the State he owes, either directly or indirectly, the general development of his faculties or any other benefit so incalculable, and to make that the ground of a claim for eternal gratitude on his part toward the State, is either bitter irony or a deliberate imposture. To this moment you have discharged your debts to me, and I mine to you. From this moment you cease to discharge them; I do the same. The account balances; we are quits.'

2

So far concerning the right of one man to dissolve the contract which bound him to the State. But what is the right of one is the right equally of more. In any numbers, large or small, men are at liberty to renounce the engagements which they have hitherto recognised as binding; and so long as they make no attempt to force compliance upon others, are free to found a fresh community upon whatever terms they please. There is no need for them to leave their old home; that, with all their property, is their own to do with as they will, and the State has no part nor lot in the control 1 Die Frage, ob sie ihren Vertrag ändern können, jener-ob sie überhaupt einen Vertrag schliessen können-völlig gleich ist' (Fichte's Werke, vi. p. 86). Ib. pp. 116, 136-48.

either of it or of the movements of its owners. It may be said that the original community is injured by the formation of a new one in the midst of it. But that objection comes with a bad grace from those who not only endure but court the existence of such 'states within the State '-the Jewish community, for instance, or the Church, or the military caste-in the heart of their society. And even were the injury ten times greater than in fact it is, no State has the right forcibly to prevent it. To drive men to the choice between unwilling membership of a given community and an equally unwilling banishment from house and home is to put constraint upon the most precious of all their liberties, to violate a right which belongs to them purely as they are men, a right which the State never gave and which it is utterly beyond its competence to take away.1

Thus the State is to Fichte, throughout its existence, what to other writers of his school it was only at the hour of its formation; a purely voluntary association, a partnership that may be renounced at any moment by any number of the individuals who in the first instance combined to form it. It is a rope of sand liable, by his own admission, to crumble into nothing at the first touch. Its very territory, or what passes for such, is a happy camping-ground on which various companies, to any number, are invited to set up their rival booths. Well might Fichte say, 'In the sphere of politics the moral law is silent'; for all sense of obligation between man and man is explicitly shut out from it, and the very promise, to which the State owes its being, proclaims itself from the first as revocable at pleasure. Well might he add, 'There we stand free to act purely as we please'; for no other writer had carried out with consistency so unflinching the sacred right of the individual to change his mind.

It is true that Fichte betrays some embarrassment in asserting the eternal privilege of those who make contracts to break them. He is aware that he will be charged with standing forward as the advocate of bad faith. He does not shrink from admitting that he will be called the apologist of liars.2 He bases his plea upon the absolute separation of politics from morals, and on the absurdity of turning questions of natural right into a crusade on behalf of honesty 1 Werke, vi. pp. 148-54.

24

66

Du sagst mir: Wenn auch Er log, so will doch Ich kein Lügner seyn." . . . Verbindet meine Moralität den anderen zu der gleichen Moralität? Ich bin nicht Executor des Sittengesetzes überhaupt; das ist Gott. Dieser hat die Lügenhaftigkeit zu strafen; ich bin nur Executor meiner durch das Sittengesetz mir verstatteten Rechte, und unter diese Rechte gehört die Aufsicht über die Herzensreinigkeit anderer nicht' (ib. Pp. 112, 113).

and the moral law. That, however, is just the significant point in his position. He says clearly what other writers of his school had shrunk from explaining even to themselves. He gives explicit utterance to a principle which, from the first, had been implied by the whole theory of contract and individual rights. Once put the individual to stand purely by himself, and Fichte was right in thinking that the moral law, which is nothing more nor less than the articulate expression of the primal bond between man and man, can have no meaning for him. Previous writers had contented themselves with confining the usurpations of morals on politics within as narrow limits as possible. Fichte, with more consistency, is resolved to put a stop to them altogether.

And this brings us to the other point which gives interest to the Beiträge. It was because he banished moral claims from the field of politics that Fichte was also led to repudiate compulsion. He saw what previous champions of contract had never discovered, that the two things stand or fall together; that to base the coercive power of the State on the supposed consent of the individual is a contradiction; and that it is only in the name of a law which exists altogether independently of the individual that the individual can legitimately be controlled. This discovery gave an entirely new turn to the theory of contract.

From the first that theory had held within itself two discordant elements. It sought to combine the principle of individual independence with the principle of coercive authority. It is plain that, as a matter of abstract right, the two principles cannot logically exist together. And, from the first, it was the former element that carried everything before it in the sphere of practice. But it was reserved for Fichte to assert its supremacy in the region of theory. The Beiträge, in fact, is the speculative counterpart of what Paine with some justice has called the spontaneous anarchy' of the first era of the Revolution. And it has, what in the realm of theory is a less questionable virtue than in that of practice, the merit of unwavering consistency. At the same time it must be admitted that, in striking out the element of compulsion from the theory of contract, Fichte was robbing that theory of all that had made it plausible. It may safely be said that the vast popularity of the theory was due to the aptness with which it seemed to harmonise the two elements essential to the healthy life of the State, the element of individual freedom and the element of corporate control. The term Contract was in fact a brilliant metaphor whose force lay in the skill with which it wedded these distinct and, in truth, contradictory ideals. From

1 'Du musst nicht aus den Grenzen des Naturrechtes in die der Moral übergehen' (Werke, vi. p. 112).

the moment of its coinage the metaphor was mistaken for an argument; and, as an argument, its cogency depended on the maintenance of the balance between the two ideals which it embodied. Directly one or other of them is dropped, the metaphor loses its virtue; and the argument, covertly founded on it, is overthrown. And this is precisely what was done by Fichte. In dropping the principle of compulsion, he broke the spell which the theory of contract had cast over the minds of men for so many generations. He made it plain that the supposed fusion between the two elements of the theory had from the first been a delusion. In banishing compulsion from politics, as previously in divorcing politics explicitly from morals, he reduced the theory of contract to absurdity.

In the Beiträge we have what is perhaps the most trenchant statement of individualist politics that has ever seriously been put forward. But, consistent as he is, even Fichte is unable to avoid occasional lapses into the instinctive prejudices of mankind; and this is the more natural, because his main argument, which in effect narrows the sphere of politics to the material needs of man, is in glaring contradiction with the idealist principles which it was his life's work to establish.

1

Thus we find him eager to insist that the only possible end' of the State is to train men in the service of freedom; that ceaseless progress in that service is the inalienable right of man; and, what is most significant of all, that such progress is imposed on man as a duty by the moral law. Even if freedom" is to be here taken, as Fichte seems to assert, in the purely negative sense of the right to acknowledge no law save that which I impose upon myself,'3 we have yet an explicit abandonment of the position that the moral law is silent in politics.' And whether Fichte is in fact able to limit the term in this manner, must be regarded as more than doubtful. For, if this were in truth all, by what right would he talk of progress? How could he speak of men being gradually prepared by the discipline of government to do

1 'Eine Widerlegung (dieser Grundsätze) . . . müsste zeigen, dass Cultur zur Freiheit nicht der einzig-mögliche Endzweck der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft sei; dass es kein unveräusserliches Menschenrecht sei in dieser Cultur bis ins unendliche fortzuschreiten' (Fichte's Werke, vi. p. 106; compare p. 101).

2 Möchte noch so scharf erwiesen sein, dass jede Staatsverfassung vermöge des durch das Sittengesetz geforderten Fortgangs der Cultur von Zeit zu Zeit abgeändert und verbessert werden müsse. . .,' etc. (ib. p. III; compare p. 101).

3 Die politische Freiheit (ist) das Recht, kein Gesetz anzuerkennen, als welches man sich selbst gab' (ib. p. 101).