By the Persistence of Force, we really mean the persistence of some Cause which transcends our knowledge and conception. In asserting it we assert an Unconditioned Reality without beginning or end.
Such starting point, by its very nature, cannot be a demonstrable fact, nor can it be comprehended in strict logical fashion, i.e. brought under a notion.
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Every Science must take its origin from that which is in itself unsusceptible of proof. Its first principles cannot be a proposition for which reason can be advanced; it cannot even be the expression of a fact which is given in experience; but it must express that which lies at the basis of all experience of all consciousness.
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The Ego becomes aware of its own activity as self c positing only in and by opposition to self.
Infinite activity – i.e. activity related only to itself is never, as such, conscious activity.
Consciousness works through reflection and reflection is only through limitation.
So soon as we reflect upon the activity of the Ego; the Ego is finite.
Were the question raised, Is the Ego infinite? the Ego by the very question is finite.
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So much reality as the Ego posits in itself, so much does it negate in the non-Ego;
So much reality as it posits in the non-Ego, so much does it negate in itself.
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The Ego, as positing is the sum of all reality, and therefore of activity. But as positing, it posits a definite portion of this total sphere of reality, and every definition is equivalent as respects the whole.
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The Ego is therefore passive through its own activity. As sum of reality and activity the Ego is substance.
All sensation is accompanied by the feeling of the passivity of the Ego – i.e. by the feeling of constraint or necessity. This feeling of compulsion, enriched by other products of the reflective Energy of the Ego, is an essential element in the belief in External reality.
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All the so-called Activity of the world, – reading, speaking and the like (feeling, passions) – is mostly passivity and idleness. In real work, the world loses itself in the Ego.
Rights are the condition of individuality. But Rights are always wrong.
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The absolute end of reason is the infinite realization of the moral law. The world of the senses is not a reality in itself, but the necessary means for accomplishing the task of reason. It has its foundation in that moral law, in which finite intelligences have also their bond of union.
Belief in the reality of the moral order of the Universe the’ connection, that the morally good will is a free and effective cause in the intelligible system of things, this and this only is a belief in God.
For a rational being God is the moral order of the Universe, – not an order which has its ground external to itself – but the order which is the ground of all reality.
Says Fichte:
There is no more striking proof that the knowledge of true religion has hitherto been very rare among men, and that in particular, it is a stranger in the prevailing systems, than this, that they universally place eternal blessedness beyond the grave, and never for a moment imagine that whoever will may here and at once be blessed.
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Everything great and good upon which our present existence rests, from which it has proceeded, exists only because noble and powerful men have resigned all the enjoyments of life for the sake of ideas.
In the divine Economy, the outward failure of his deed is the means of forcing him in upon himself, and of raising him to the yet higher stand-point of true religion i.e. to the comprehension of what it really is that he loves and strives after.