It is as the result of this inner urge to activity that we long for a better world than the one which we see around us, and belief in that better world is the food by which we live. Fichte makes confession of unbounded optimism. “All those outbreaks of untamed force before which human power is annihilated, those devastating hurricanes, [pg 130] those earthquakes, those volcanic eruptions, can be nothing else than the last wrestlings of the wild mass of nature against the uniformly progressive, purposive, and life-promoting course to which, in opposition to its own tendencies, it is being compelled.” . . . “Nature is to become to us more and more transparent and capable of examination even to its innermost secret, and enlightened human power, armed with its own inventions, is destined to master it without trouble, and then to exploit peacefully its once for all made conquest.”_(_45_)_ Here Fichte gives us the triumphant pagan of the belief in progress which the spirit of the modern age, that lives on the achievements of its knowledge and power, has been composing since the Renaissance. He is as thoroughly convinced as the staunchest rationalist that nature is the buffalo which has remained refractory so long, but will at last be brought beneath the yoke. That mankind will perfect itself and reach a condition of unbroken peace, is to him as certain as the perfection that nature will one day arrive at. At present, it is true, we are in a period of arrested progress with temporary setbacks, but when this is past, and all useful things which have been discovered at one end of the world, get known to and distributed to all, then mankind, using its powers in complete co-operation and marching forward in step, will raise itself uninterruptedly, without arrest of progress or setback, to a culture of which we can form no conception. To the State Fichte assigns in his early writings a not very important _rôle_, but in his later ones a great one. In _The Foundations of the Law of Nature_ (_Grundlage des Naturrechts_) (1796), it is for him only the maintainer of law and order. In his work _The Complete Commercial State_ (_Der geschlossene Handelsstaat_), which appeared in 1800, he allows it to organize industry and to take over social duties. In his _Addresses to the German Nation_ (_Reden an die deutsche Nation_, 1808), he makes it a moral educator and a protector of the virtue of humanity. [pg 131]