Note 10 — Chapter II

Asiatic Researches, loc. cit. The worshipped principle of Hindooism is not love, but power. Certain objects are adored as containing divine energy. The Guru is a representative and vehicle of divine power—a Godful man, and accordingly the most imperious of task-masters. The prodigies of asceticism, so abundant in Indian fable, had commonly for their object the attainment of superhuman powers. Thus Taraki, according to the Siva Puran, stood a hundred years on tip-toe, lived a hundred years on air, a hundred on fire, &c. for this purpose.—Notes to Curse of Kehama, p. 237.

The following passage, cited by Ward, exhibits the subjective idealism of these Hindoos in its most daring absurdity. ‘Let every one meditate upon himself; let him be the worshipper and the worship. Whatever you see is but yourself, and father and mother are nonentities; you are the infant and the old man, the wise man and the fool, the male and the female; it is you who are drowned in the stream—you who pass over; you are the sensualist and the ascetic, the sick man and the strong; in short, whatsoever you see, that is you, as bubbles, surf, and billows are all but water.’

Now, there is an obvious resemblance between this idealism and that of Fichte. The Indian and the German both ignore the notions formed from mere sensible experience; both dwell apart from experience, in a world fashioned for themselves out of ‘pure thought;’ both identify thought and being, subject and object. But here the likeness ends. The points of contrast are obvious. The Hindoo accepts as profoundest wisdom what would be an unfair caricature of the system of Fichte. The idealism of the Oriental is dreamy and passive; it dissolves his individuality; it makes him a particle, wrought now into this, now into that, in the ever-shifting phantasmagoria of the universe; he has been, he may be, he, therefore, in a sense is, anything and everything. Fichte’s philosophy, on the contrary, rests altogether on the intense activity—on the autocracy of the Ego, which posits, or creates, the Non-Ego. He says, ‘The activity and passivity of the Ego are one and the same. For in as far as it does not posit a something in itself, it posits that something in the Non-Ego. Again, the activity and passivity of the Non-Ego are one and the same. In as far as the Non-Ego works upon the Ego, and will absorb a something in it, the Ego posits that very thing in the Non-Ego.’ (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, § 3. Sämmtliche Werke, v. i. p. 177.) Action is all in all with him. God he calls ‘a pure Action’ (reines Handeln), the life and principle of a supersensuous order of the world—just as I am a pure Action, as a link in that order. (Gerichtliche Verantwortung gegen die Anklage des Atheismus, Werke, v. p. 261.) Charged with denying personality to God, Fichte replies that he only denied him that conditioned personality which belongs to ourselves—a denial, I suppose, in which we should all agree. The only God in his system which is not an uninfluential abstraction is manifestly the Ego—that is dilated to a colossal height, and deified. Pre-eminently anti-mystical as was the natural temperament of Fichte, here he opens a door to the characteristic misconception of mysticism—the investiture of our own notions and our own will with a divine authority or glory. He would say, ‘The man of genius does think divine thoughts. But the man who is unintelligible, who, in the very same province of pure thought as that occupied by the true philosopher, thinks only at random and incoherently; he is mistaken, I grant, in arrogating inspiration—him I call a mystic.’ But of unintelligibility or incoherence what is to be the test,—who is to be the judge? In this anarchy of gods, numerous as thinkers, one deity must have as much divine right as another. There can be no appeal to experience, which all confessedly abandon; no appeal to facts, which each Ego creates after its own fashion for itself.