deduces the three laws of thought, identity, contradiction, and sufficient reason, and the three categories of quality—­reality, negation, and limitation or determination.  Instead of following him in these labors, we may emphasize the significance of his view of the ego as pure activity without an underlying substratum, with which he carries dynamism over from the Kantian philosophy of nature to metaphysics.  We must not conceive the ego as something which must exist before it can put forth its activities.  Doing is not a property or consequence of being, but being is an accident and effect of doing.  All substantiality is derivative, activity is primal; being arises from doing.  The ego is nothing more than self-position; it exists not only for itself (fuer sich), but also through itself (durch sich).

[Footnote 1:  The ego spoken of in the first of the principles, the ego as the object of intellectual intuition and as the ground and creator of all being, is, as the second Introduction to the Science of Knowledge clearly announces, not the individual, but the I-ness (Ichheit) (which is to be presupposed as the prius of the manifold of representation, and which is exalted above the opposition of subject and object), mentality in general, eternal reason, which is common to all and the same in all, which is present in all thinking and at the basis thereof, and to which particular persons stand related merely as accidents, as instruments, as special expressions, destined more and more to lose themselves in the universal form of reason.  But, further still, a distinction must be made between the absolute ego as intuition (as the form of I-ness), from which the Science of Knowledge starts, and the ego as Idea (as the supreme goal of practical endeavor) with which it ends.  In neither is the ego conceived as individual; in the former the I-ness is not yet determined to the point of individuality, in the latter individuality has disappeared, Fichte is right when he thinks it remarkable that “a system whose beginning and end and whole nature is aimed at forgetfulness of individuality in the theoretical sphere and denial of it in the practical sphere” should be “called egoism.”  And yet not only opponents, but even adherents of Fichte, as is shown by Friedrich Schlegel’s philosophy of genius, have, by confusing the pure and the empirical ego, been guilty of the mistake thus censured.  On the philosophy of the romanticists cf.  Erdmann’s History, vol. ii.  Sec.Sec. 314, 315; Zeller, p. 562 seq.; and R. Haym, Die Romantische Schule, 1870.]