I: My consciousness of the object is only a yet unrecognised consciousness of my production of the representation of an object. Of this production I … - Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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.

The fundamental maxim of those who stand at the head of this Age, and therefore the principle of the Age, is this,—to accept nothing as really existing or obligatory, but that which they can understand and clearly comprehend. With regard to this fundamental principle, as we have now declared and adopted it without farther definition or limitation, this third Age is precisely similar to that which is to follow it, the fourth, or age of Reason as Science,—and by virtue of this similarity prepares the way for it. Before the tribunal of Science, too, nothing is accepted but the Conceivable. Only in the application of the principle there is this difference between the two Ages,—that the third, which we shall shortly name that of Empty Freedom, makes its fixed and previously acquired conceptions the measure of existence; while the fourth—that of Science—on the contrary, makes existence the measure, not of its acquired, but of its desiderated beliefs.

My immediate consciousness, my absolute perception, cannot go beyond myself, — I have immediate knowledge only of myself, whatever I know further I know only by reasoning, in the same manner in which I have come to those conclusions concerning the original powers of Nature, which certainly do not lie within the circle of my perceptions. I, however, — that which I call myself, — am not the man-forming power of Nature, but only one of its manifestations ; and only of this manifestation am I conscious, not of that power, whose existence I have only discovered from the necessity of explaining my own.