Now the absolute Ego, because it is infinite will to activity cannot persist in being merely an Ego. It establishes a non-Ego to be a limit to itself in order that it may again and again overcome it, and thereby become conscious of itself as will to activity. This proceeding takes place amid the multiplicity of finite rational beings. In their power of intuition the sensible world becomes actual, and in their overcoming of it they recognize a duty which makes itself mysteriously felt within them and unites them with the world-spirit. This is the meaning of the philosophy of the identity of Ego and non-Ego. It is not only, then, that the world exists merely in my mental creation of it: it is, further, only produced in me in order that I may have something on which my will to fulfilment of duty can exercise itself. The phenomena of becoming and disappearing which I project out of myself [pg 128] exist only that I may through them comprehend myself as an ethical being. In this way epistemological idealism and the categorical imperative, when they act together and one climbs on the shoulders of the other, can look behind the curtain which hides the secret of the world. Kant protests against the idea that Fichte’s system is to be considered the completion of his philosophy. As a matter of fact, however, Fichte does with ingenious art continue the lines which were begun in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ and the _Critique of the Practical Reason_, and think out the ideas of the philosopher of Königsberg to a self-contained world- and life-affirming ethical world-view. He presents them in a generally intelligible form in _The Destiny of Man_, published in 1800. This book is one of the most powerful documents produced by the struggle for an ethical world-view. Fichte gives a content to the abstract, absolute duty of Kant, making it consist in this, that man, as the instrument of the ever-active absolute Ego, assigns to himself the destiny of working with the latter “to bring the whole sensible world under the sovereignty of reason.” Since his fundamental moral principle possesses a content, Fichte is able to deduce particular demands from it, but that content is so general and vague that the code of duty which is drawn out from it has but little vital force. Nothing can really be got out of this fundamental principle beyond the demand that man shall in every situation of life fulfil the duties which from time to time fall to him as a result of his destiny of having to help forward the sovereignty of reason over nature. Fichte therefore distinguishes the general duties which man, as such, has to fulfil, and the special ones which are incumbent on him according to his natural gifts, his social position, and his profession. The latter are emphasized as specially important.