What are these purposes? One thing is clear from the first: There cannot be a purpose where there is not a will. If we come from pure experience to knowledge by a purposive transformation, we must acknowledge the reality of will in ourselves, or rather, we must find ourselves as will in the midst of pure experience before we reach any knowledge. And so it is indeed. We can abstract from all those reconstructions which the sciences suggest to us and go back to the most immediate naïve experience; but we can never reach an experience which does not contain the doubleness of subject and object, of will and world. That doubleness has nothing whatever to do with the difference of physical and psychical; both the physical thing and the psychical idea are objects. The antithesis is not that between two kinds of objects, since we have seen that in the immediate experience the objects are not at all split up into the two groups of material and mental things; it is rather the antithesis between the object in its undifferentiated state on the one side and the subject in its will-attitude on the other side. Yes, even if we speak of the subject which stands as a unity behind the will-attitudes, we are already reconstructing the real experience in the interest of the purposes of knowledge. In the immediate experience, we have the will-attitudes themselves, and not a subject which wills them.
If we ask ourselves finally what is then the ultimate difference between those two elements of our pure experience, between the object and the will-attitude, we stand before the ultimate data: we call that element which exists merely through a reference to its opposite, the object, and we call that element of our experience which is complete in itself, the attitude of the will. If we experienced liking or disliking, affirming or denying, approving or disapproving in the same way in which we experience the red and the green, the sweet and the sour, the rock and the tree and the moon, we should know objects only. But we do experience them in quite a different way. The rock and the tree do not point to anything else, but the approval has no reality if it does not point to its opposition in disapproval, and the denial has no meaning if it is not meant in relation to the affirmative. This doubleness of our primary experience, this having of objects and of antagonistic attitudes must be acknowledged wherever we speak of experience at all. We know no object without attitude, and no attitude without object. The two are one state; object and attitude form a unity which we resolve by the different way in which we experience these two features of the one state: we find the object and we live through the attitude. It is a different kind of awareness, the having of the object and the taking of the attitude. In real life our will is never an object which we simply perceive. The psychologist may treat the will as such, but in the immediate experience of real life, we are certain of our action by doing it and not by perceiving our doing; and this our performing and rejecting is really our self which we posit as absolute reality, not by knowing it, but by willing it. This corner-stone of the Fichtean philosophy was forgotten throughout the uncritical and unphilosophical decades of a mere naturalistic age. But our time has finally come to give attention to it again.