But the theoretical consciousness is not all; and as we already know, the practical Ego is supreme over it. In it lies the key to the mystery of the stimulus--the shock from the unknown--which awakened the activity of the Ego. The non-ego is only a mass of resistance created by the Ego so that it may be active; only a stepping-stone on which it may walk; a spring-board from which it may bound. Only so much reality has the non-ego; the reality of something which may be shaped, made, made use of. Call the something which the stimulus (_Anstoss_) pre-supposes, the thing-in-itself (after Kant): and if you ask How are things-in-themselves constituted, you get from the _Wissenschaftslehre_ the answer: 'They are as we should make them[10],' Or, as it is said in another place: 'My world is--object and sphere of my duties and absolutely nothing else[11]:' if you ask whether there is really such a world, the only sound reply I can give is: 'I have certainly and truthfully these definite duties, which take the form of duties _towards_ such, and _in_ such, objects; and it is only in a world such as I there represent and not elsewhere that I can perform these duties which I cannot conceive otherwise,'
This is a grand word: and yet we feel that, in the intensity of intellectual consecutiveness and moral inflexibleness, we have lost some elements to which Kant had given their place in the philosophy of life. The third of Kant's three Criticisms is conspicuous by its absence from the Fichtean field of view, and has no recognition in this scheme of the universe: and the great conception of the natural world as an organism, in which natural man is only a part, and all is controlled by an autonomous principle of life, has been for the while allowed to drop. Even more than in Kant religion tends to be an epilogue or appendix to morality: and God is identified with the moral order of the world. It is customary to speak of Fichte's idealism as ethical, or as subjective: and so long as these words are understood, no harm is done. But to call it subjective does not mean that Fichte was so far beside himself as to believe the world was only a picture or a function of his individual brain. It means that he throws the weight too much on the side of subjectivity. The Absolute is, for him in his first stage, described as an Absolute Ego--and thereby the natural world seems to be left without God: and subjective duty has too exclusively thrown on it the weight of certifying objective existence. The world, as we shall see, and have indeed indirectly gathered from Kant, is too good and worthy to be the mere block of stone out of which our duties are to be hewn. And similarly, to call Fichte an ethical idealist is only to name him right, when we add that his were idealist ethics. The world is not here merely that social decorum may be maintained, and that puritanical virtue may pronounce that all is so well, that thenceforth there shall be no cakes and ale, nor ginger be hot in the mouth. The friend of the two brothers Schlegel, and their remarkable wives, Dorothea and Caroline, touched hands with a social group[12] which, for good and for ill, had emancipated itself from all codes except that which bids