But, as was to be expected, the unity and force are paid for by a considerable surrender of catholicity. If Kant's utterances are fused into comparative simplicity, the unification does not embrace the whole of the Kantian gospels. What Fichte did in his earlier stage--the stage by which he counts in the history of philosophy--was to emphasise and exhibit in his systematic statement that priority or supremacy of the 'practical' over the 'theoretical' reason which Kant had enunciated, and to put in the very foreground that self or Ego which Kant had indicated, under the title of 'transcendental unity of apperception,' as the focus which gives coherence and objectivity to experience. But to put the final presupposition at the head and front of all, as a principle originating and governing the whole line of procedure, is really to modify in a thorough-going way the whole aspect of a doctrine and its inner constitution. Kant's way is quiet analysis: from the given, or what is supposed given, up regressively to its final presuppositions, its latent _prius._ He shows you the thing is so, apparently without effort, by judicious application of the proper re-agent, as it were. Fichte, on the contrary, pours forth a strong current of deduction: Let it be assumed that so and so is, then _must,_ or then shall, something else be; and so onwards. Instead of a glance at the secret substructure of the world, you see it, at a magician's mandate, building itself up; stone calling to stone, and beam to beam, to fill up the gaps and bind the walls together. And you must not merely read or listen. You are summoned as a partner in the work; a work the author feels, only half-consciously, he has not yet quite accomplished, and where therefore he complains of the bystander's dullness.
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.
