Fichte had caught hold of this standpoint. He had seen that the original antithesis which confronts us, and the conjunction (synthesis) of its members, presupposed a still more fundamental and indeed absolute thesis,--an aboriginal and active unity. That antithesis is the opposition of ego and not-ego; that synthesis is every act of knowledge and will, by which each of these powers is in turn limited by the other. Such a synthesis (volition or cognition) would be impossible unless on the fundamental thesis (or hypothesis) of a unity, or identity, which gives rise to the antithesis and has the power of overcoming it. Such an original unity is what he calls the absolute Ego. I am what I know and will, and what I know and will is Me. Such is the equation (briefly written, I = I) which identifies subject and object (of knowledge and will). But the associations clinging to the terms Fichte used gave this thought a one-sided direction. The '_I_' is opposed to the _'Thee,'_ and the '_Them,_' and the 'It.' The 'thing'--or non-ego--is depreciated as compared with the thinker and willer. It is postulated _ad majorem gloriam_ of the Ego: in order that I may work out the full fruition of my being. It is what I ought to make out of it. It _is_ nothing but what it _will be_--or will be if I do what I ought to do. The identity of the two sides therefore is left as 'the object of an endless task, an absolute imperative.' The Absolute is not yet:--it is only the forecast of a postulated result.
'If this be what Fichte teaches, and be called subjective idealism, then for Schelling the first thing is to quit the house of bondage. Let us leave out of view the Ego, with its misleading associations, and begin with the two fields which are known to us, the fields of Nature and Spirit. Nature--not Matter--is the one side: Mind or Spirit the other. Each of them furnishes the object of one branch of philosophy--a philosophy of Nature, on one hand, and a transcendental idealism on the other. The former is new, and more especially Schelling's own proper continuation of Kant: the other partly a continuation of Fichte's work. But as they are both philosophy, they must coincide or meet. The whole philosophy may therefore call itself a philosophy of Identity; but, for the while, it will present itself under the two aspects of a philosophy of Nature, conceived as the blind and unconscious, a philosophy of Mind and history, as the free and conscious product of intelligence.[4]