The man who, with the help of epistemological idealism, has made his way through to the higher rationalism, is safe from losing his optimism, even though he goes through the cruellest experiences. He has grasped the fact that the sensible world is only the limit which the infinitely active will has created on purpose to be overcome. This lends him inward independence in the face of all happenings. He has no need to understand them individually. He can let a large proportion of them be put aside as puzzling to his finite spirit. What is essential he knows: viz. that what is real in the world is not matter, but spirit only. Partaking of the eternally active spirit, man is raised above the world, and is eternal. The sufferings he meets with afflict nature only “with which he is connected in a marvellous way,” but not himself, the being who is exalted above the whole of nature. Of death he has no fear. He does not die to himself, but merely to those who survive him. . . . “All death in nature is birth. . . . Nature is throughout nothing but life. It is not death which kills, but the living life which, concealed behind the old one, now begins and proceeds to develop. Death and birth are nothing but the struggle of life with itself in an effort to reveal itself more and more clearly and more and more like its real self.” It is in similar words that the Chinese monist, Chwang-tse, announces that life is eternal and the dying of an individual only means that one existence is being re-cast to form another. . Fichte’s mysticism of activity incapable of being carried through Fichte’s philosophy of absolute activity is the expression of his own strong ethical personality, which with impetuosity and self-sacrifice takes problems in hand, and uses itself up in the strain involved. But even he is unable to make a genuine combination of epistemological idealism and ethical so as to produce an ethical world-view which is a [pg 132] necessity of thought. The impossibility of the undertaking reveals itself everywhere.