How then does the Third Age acquire the kind of scoffing irony which serves it in place of Wit, and its measure of the Ridiculous! Thus:–it sets it d… - Johann Gottlieb Fichte

When one rational being affects another rational being as mere matter, then the lower sense of that being is also affected, it is true, and is so affected necessarily and altogether independently of the freedom of that being, (as the lower sense is indeed always affected;) but it is not to be assumed that this affection was in the intention of the person who produced it. His intention was merely to attain his purpose, to express his conception in matter, and he never took into consideration whether that matter would feel it or not. Hence, the reciprocal influence of rational beings upon each other, as such, always occurs by means of the higher sense; for only the higher sense is one which cannot be affected without having been presupposed. Our criterion of this reciprocal influence remains, therefore, correct.

Wenn ich nur dasjenige weiß, und von ihm überzeugt bin, was ich selbst gefunden, – nur dasjenige wirklich kenne, was ich selbst erfahren habe, so kann ich in der That nicht sagen, daß ich über meine Bestimmung das Geringste wisse; ich weiß blos, was Andre darüber zu wissen behaupten.

There is nothing whatever in Existence but immediate and living Thought:—Thought, I say, but by no means a thinking substance, a dead body in which thought inheres,—with which no-thought indeed a no-thinker is full surely at hand:—Thought, I say, and also the real Life of this Thought, which at bot tom is the Divine Life; both of which—Thought and , this its real Life—are molten together into one inward organic Unity; like as, outwardly, they are one simple, identical, eternal, and unchangeable Unity.