1. The World View Of German Idealism. A Consideration Regarding Our Fateful Times

But now this I, with the help of the bodily organization, confronts the external sense world. This external sense world is permanent, it is something that cannot create itself, and is therefore less real than the I, which is constantly creating itself. Why then does the I, this absolutely creative I, enter the less real sense world? Because this I, with the ideas, the ideals, with the moral duty - which flows into the ideas, the ideals, into this I - needs a field of activity to live itself out. For Fichte, the world of the senses is not there for its own sake, but, as he says, as a sensitized material for the reception of duty, that is, of ideas and ideals. For Fichte, the world is there because duties, ideas, and ideals are paramount in spiritual life, and because these ideas and ideals need a world of the senses in order to be active. Thus the world of sense must be there as the consequence of ideas and ideals. Today we need not go into what we have on our soul, perhaps against the scope or the fundamental truth of such a world view; we only want to go into the way of the people's striving. We want to go into what strives within the soul power of the people to recognize the truth. We want to trace the character of this popular striving in the time that preceded the one in which the German people created their state, the external structure of their activity, which they must now defend with blood and arms, but which they created because they drew the strength to do so from what preceded this state, but which is rooted in the deepest peculiarity of the German national soul. And from this point of view, let us also direct our gaze to the man who has now continued Fichte in a certain way, who has worked alongside Fichte, after Fichte, the much-tried Schelling.