In a word,
_he was his idea of himself_: and this insight opens a new chapter not
only in his philosophy but in the history of human self-estimation.
Mankind was henceforth invited not to think of itself as a tribe of
natural beings, nor of souls, with a specific nature and fixed
possibilities. Each man was a romantic personage or literary character: he
was simply what he was thought to be, and might become anything that he
could will to become. The way was opened for Napoleon on the one hand and
for Fichte on the other.
III
Page 9. __All_ ideas must be equally conditioned._
Even the mathematical ideas which seem so exactly to describe the dynamic
order of nature are not repetitions of their natural counterpart: for
mathematical form in nature is a web of diffuse relations enacted; in the
mind it is a thought possessed, the logical synthesis of those deployed
relations. To run in a circle is one thing; to conceive a circle is
another. Our mind by its animal roots (which render it relevant to the
realm of matter and cognitive) and by its spiritual actuality (which
renders it original, synthetic, and emotional) is a language, from its
beginnings; almost, we might say, a biological poetry; and the greater the
intellectuality and poetic abstraction the greater the possible range. Yet
we must not expect this scope of speculation in us to go with adequacy or
exhaustiveness: on the contrary, mathematics and religion, each in its way
so sure, leave most of the truth out.
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