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Updated: April 30, 2025
As Coleridge says, ‘It is the man that makes the motive, and not the motive the man.’ ” According to this Calvinistic divine, the will is not determined by the strongest motive; on the contrary, it is self-active and self-determined. “Mind is a self-acting substance,” says he; “and hence its activity and independence.” In open defiance of all Calvinistic and necessitarian philosophy, he even adopts the self-determining power of the will. “Nor have necessitarians,” says he, “even of the highest order, been sufficiently careful to guard the language employed by them.
It is not difficult to conceive that he should produce spiritual beings like himself, who can act without being necessitated to act, like the inanimate portions of creation, as well as those of an inferior nature. Nor is it more difficult to conceive that man, in point of fact, possesses such a limited self-active power, than it is to conceive that God possesses an infinite self-active power.
It only exists and can only exist in these its single self-active representations. But in relation to each of them it is transcendent. Each star and flower, each beast and man, is its partial representation. But the whole together is that Power which while it transcends is yet resident in, and inspires, each single part which goes to its making.
A Will which acts purely and simply as will, by its own agency, entirely without any instrument or sensuous medium of its efficacy; which is absolutely, in itself, at once action and result; which wills and it is done, which commands and it stands fast; in which, accordingly, the demand of Reason to be absolutely free and self-active is represented.
And this intuitive principle leads us to expect the reign of causation, not only among the thoughts and feelings generally, but among the wishes and volitions of the soul.” Now here is the question, How can the soul be self-active, self-determined, and yet all its thoughts, and feelings, and volitions, have producing causes?
The world for Fichte is at bottom a spiritual order, the revelation of a self-determining ego or reason; hence the science of the ego, or reason, the Wissenschaftslehre, is the key to all knowledge, and we can understand nature and man only when we have caught the secret of the self-active ego.
It would result in mutual profit and, what is better, in mutual love and happiness. One of the greatest factors in a true education is to be interested, self-active, and busy toward a definite and worthy end.
His representation of this matter is this: Man, as a spirit, is reason and will, self-active, determining, form-giving; this is described by Schiller as the form-instinct; man, as a sensuous being, is determinable, receptive, termed to matter; Schiller describes this as the material instinct, "Stofftrieb."
Man's power makes use of means, the divine power is self-active. God can because he wills; his will is his power. God is good; this is certain; but man finds his happiness in the welfare of his kind. God's happiness consists in the love of order; for it is through order that he maintains what is, and unites each part in the whole.
That is to say, when the minstrel became an instrument and uttered music, it was because the spirit of God played upon him. So long as a man is self-active, he cannot receive the Holy Ghost.
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