Generically, speculative German philosophy is essentially related to the Græco-Oriental Gnosticism, which in the first centuries of the Christian era advances its views concerning the emergence of the sensible world from the world of pure Being._(_43_)_ The Gnostic systems aim at establishing a world-view [pg 126] of redemption. They concentrate on the question how the spiritual individualities which find themselves in the material world came there, and how they can return from it into the world of pure Being. Speculative German philosophy on the other hand tries to obtain such a knowledge of the world as shall give a meaning to the activities of the spiritual individualities in the world. Speculative thinking at the beginning of the Christian era is dualistic and pessimistic; that at the beginning of the nineteenth is monistic and optimistic. In both cases, however, the method of obtaining the world-view is the same. Among the representatives of the speculative philosophy the most eminent are: Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). It is only Fichte and Hegel, however, who produce world-views with a characteristic stamp of their own. Schelling gets no further than a nature-philosophy, and stands almost completely aside from the struggle for an optimistic-ethical world-view with which his age is occupied. Kept in a perpetual state of flux, his thinking makes use of all possible starting-points one after another and is now more concerned with natural science, now more akin to Spinoza’s thought, and now to Christian. He never makes a definite, conscious attempt to found an ethic. Fichte’s speculative founding of an ethic and of optimism Fichte begins as the antipodes of Spinoza._(_44_)_ He aims at extracting from the universe a confession that it is a purely [pg 127] optimistic ethical one, by thinking Kant’s thoughts out to a conclusion. Kant, according to him, made the mistake of not bringing his two discoveries, viz. epistemological idealism and the ethic of the categorical imperative into that inward connexion with one another in which they really stand. What is the meaning of the fact that the moral law and the sensible world both become actual in me? That is the starting-point of Fichte’s philosophizing. Through the categorical imperative I experience that my particular ego is a self-determined will to activity. Correspondingly, every “thing in itself” which I assume to exist behind phenomena as the real on which they are based, is similarly a self-determined will to activity. The essential nature of infinite Being also can consist of nothing else. The universe is, therefore, the phenomenal form of an infinite, self-determined will to activity. Why does the absolute Ego appear as a phenomenon in a sensible world? Why is Being revealed as Becoming? If I understand this, I have comprehended the meaning of the world and of my own life.