This, one may say, was a new conception, certainly a new practice, of philosophy. Kant had indeed hinted that the pupil in philosophy must 'symphilosophise'; but practically, even his aim had been to describe or narrate a process of thought with such quasi-historical vividness and detail that the listener was sympathetically carried through the succession of ideas which were called up before him. What had been generally given in philosophical literature was a sort of historical account of how thoughts happened: a succession of pictures presented with the interposition here and there of a little reasoning, expository of connexions. You enlisted your reader's sympathy: you set his imagination to work by translating the logical process into a historical event--the _Logos_ into a _Mythos_--and blending with your narrative a little explanation as to general drift and relations, you left him to himself to enjoy the _Theoria._ The nearest approach Fichte makes to this polite and easy method is in the 'Sun-clear Statement,' where he, as he says, attempts to '_force_ the reader to understand' him. But probably these things cannot be forced. And for the rest Fichte's characteristic attitude is to request, or command, his reader (or pupil) to think with him, to put himself in the posture required, to perform the act of thought described. He has not merely to be present at the lecture, but personally to perform the experiment. It is not a mere story to be heard and admired and forgotten. _De te_ O pupil! _fabula narratur._ If it be a play, you are the actor as well as the onlooker: and the play is not a play, but the drama--the nameless drama--of the soul transacted in the unseen sub-conscious depths which bear up its visible life.