The theoretical ego posits an object (Gegenstand) that the practical ego may experience resistance (Widerstand).  No action is possible without a world as the object of action; no world is possible without a consciousness which represents it; no consciousness possible without reflection of the ego on itself; no reflection without limitation, without an opposition or non-ego.  The Anstoss is deduced.  The ego posits a limit (is theoretical) in order (as practical) to overcome it.  Our duty is the only per se (Ansich) of the phenomenal world, the only truly real element in it:  “Things are in themselves that which we ought to make of them.”  Objectivity exists only to be more and more sublated, that is, to be so worked up that the activity of the ego may in it become evident.—­The same ground of explanation which reveals the necessity of an external nature enables us to understand why the one infinite ego (the universal life or the Deity, as Fichte puts it in his later works) divides into the many empirical egos or individuals, why it does not carry out its plan immediately, but through finite spirits as its organs.  Action is possible only under the form of the individual, only in individuals are consciousness and morality possible.  Without resistance, no action; without conflict, no morality.  Individuality, it is true, is to be overcome and destroyed in moral endeavor; but in order to this it must have existed.  Virtue is a conquest over external and internal nature.

A gradation of practical functions corresponding to the series of theoretical activities leads from feeling and striving (longing and desire) through the system of impulses (the impulse to representation or reflection, to production, to satisfaction) up to moral will or the impulse to harmony with self, which stands opposed to the natural impulses as the categorical imperative.  The practical ego mediates between the theoretical and the absolute ego.  The ego ought to be infinite and self-dependent, but finds itself finite and dependent on a non-ego—­a contradiction which is resolved by the ego becoming practical, by the fact that in ever increasing measure it subdues nature to itself, and by such increasing extension of the boundary draws nearer and ever nearer to the realization of its destination, to become absolute ego.

%2.  The Science of Ethics and of Right.%

The moral law demands the control of the sensuous impulse by the pure impulse.  If the former aims at comfortable ease and enjoyment, the latter is directed toward satisfaction with one’s self, to endeavor and self-dependence. (Enjoyment is inevitable, it is true, as satisfaction where any impulse whatever is carried out; only it must not form the end of action.) Morality is activity for its own sake, the radical evil—­from which only a miracle can deliver us, but a miracle which we must ourselves perform—­is inertness, lack of will to rise above the natural