In order to conceive ethics as a part of the normal course of world-happenings, Fichte, like all others who make the same attempt, gives up as hopeless any differentiation between human action and world-happenings. The world-spirit’s impulse to activity, he says, experiences itself in man as will to ethical action. But, indeed, the whole world is filled with this will to activity which is for ever surging against the limitations it has set up for itself. Everything that happens is only an expression of it. What difference, then, is there between natural happenings and ethical? Between activity in itself and ethical activity? Purposive activity directed with knowledge and intention to the subjection of the sensible world to reason is ethical, decides Fichte. But what does that mean, when closely examined? It means that the finite spirit becomes moral by entering into and taking seriously the play of the infinite spirit which aims at overcoming its own self-created limitations. Looking in this way at Fichte’s thought, we see clearly that with the world-view which results from the combination of ethical and epistemological idealism, ethics have no longer any meaning. Again, what is the meaning of “bringing the whole of the sensible world under the sovereignty of reason”? This conception of the ethical is not only too wide, but fantastic also. To a limited extent man is able to harness the forces of nature for his service, and with a little stretching of language he can, with Fichte, describe such action as not purposive merely, but also in the widest sense ethical. Upon this terrestrial globe he has some “influence,” but upon the world none. That he gives names to the mighty heavenly bodies and can calculate the orbits of many of them, cannot mean that he brings them under the sovereignty of reason. Upon deep-sea life, too, he exercises no other influence than catching specimens of it and giving them names. That he may be able to assert that there is such a thing [pg 133] as an ethical purpose in the world, Fichte falsifies the world’s birth certificate, and gives it the categorical imperative for father and epistemological idealism for mother. But this is of no use. The ethical purpose thus produced cannot satisfy ethical thought. By conceiving the infinite spirit, in which the finite spirit has a share, as will to activity, Fichte tries to make possible a world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation. In reality, however, this takes him no further than a more emphatic world- and life-affirmation, into which, with the help of speculative thought, he smuggles the idea of duty, thereupon proclaiming it to be ethical. It fares with him just as with the Chinese philosophers, who similarly exert themselves in vain to produce an ethic out of world- and life-affirmation.